Vincent Trapinaud
For Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, Ahriman is the power that hardens human beings into matter: it pushes them to believe only in what can be measured, to fear death as extinction and to lose all sense of a spiritual dimension. Facing him stands Lucifer, the opposite temptation, that of fleeing the world into exaltation. Book I of Les Fermiers (The Farmers, a trilogy currently published in French) keeps one idea above all: Ahrimanic entities are said to be drawn to fear, materialism and spiritual disorientation.
Who was Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy?
Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at Kraljevec, in present-day Croatia, and died in 1925 at Dornach, in Switzerland. Between those two dates he led two lives that never stopped crossing. The first was that of a recognized intellectual: he edited Goethe’s scientific writings, earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Rostock and published The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894. The second was that of an explorer of the invisible, who claimed to perceive directly what he called the supersensible worlds.
In 1902, he took the lead of the German section of the Theosophical Society. Ten years later he broke away and founded his own society, which he called anthroposophical: “anthroposophy,” the wisdom of the human being. He made it the heart of an immense body of work — books such as Theosophy (1904), How to Know Higher Worlds or An Outline of Occult Science, and thousands of lectures, taken down in shorthand and then published. At Dornach he built the Goetheanum, which burned on New Year’s Eve 1922–1923 and was rebuilt in concrete to his designs.
His influence reaches far beyond esoteric circles. The Steiner-Waldorf schools, the first of which opened in Stuttgart in 1919, biodynamic farming, born of a course he gave in 1924, a form of medicine and an art of movement, eurythmy, all come from him. His strangest ideas about spiritual entities therefore belong to the same body of work as some very real institutions.
Book I of Les Fermiers takes from him a stance. Steiner does not present himself as a mystic swept by visions, but as a methodical observer who claims to apply the rigor of a science to the invisible. He speaks of a “spiritual science.” Science denies him that status, but it explains the tone of his descriptions: beings, layers, functions, as in a naturalist’s treatise.
Lucifer and Ahriman: two opposite temptations
Popular Christianity knows a single adversary, the devil. Steiner describes two, and this is probably the most fertile idea in his whole cosmology. He borrows the first name from the Latin tradition: Lucifer, the “light-bearer.” He borrows the second from the ancient Iranian religion, where Angra Mainyu, who became Ahriman in Middle Persian, is the destructive spirit opposed to Ahura Mazda. But he gives both figures a meaning of his own.
Lucifer is the temptation of misplaced elevation. He pushes human beings toward ungrounded enthusiasm, spiritual pride, flight from the body and the world, the dream that refuses the earth. He is not without beauty: he carries part of the artistic impulse. His excess is the exaltation that believes itself above everything.
Ahriman is the opposite temptation: heaviness. He pushes toward cold calculation, soulless intellect, the conviction that only what can be weighed and counted exists. Where Lucifer makes us float, Ahriman makes us harden. He is not absolute evil either: without him there would be no rigor, no understanding of the physical world. His excess is petrification.
The decisive point, which book I underlines, is that these two forces do not form a Good/Evil pair. They are two symmetrical imbalances, and each is necessary in the right proportion. The human path, for Steiner, is not to choose one against the other, nor to fight them, but to hold the middle between them. He carved this idea in wood: a large sculpted group, kept at the Goetheanum, shows a central human figure standing upright between Lucifer, above, and Ahriman, below, striking neither.
This three-part structure has real psychological reach, whether or not you accept the rest. Many people, to escape a world that crushes them, take refuge in a spirituality that cuts them off from their bodies and their loved ones: that is the Luciferic side. Many others, to escape the anguish of what they do not understand, barricade themselves inside a dry realism where nothing has meaning: that is the Ahrimanic side. Both are flights. Neither one looks.
What does Ahriman represent for Steiner?
According to Steiner, the modern era is the one in which Ahriman’s influence becomes dominant. It is the age when humanity develops what he calls the “consciousness soul”: the capacity to think for oneself, to doubt, to measure. A real conquest — and at the same time an open door to hardening. The more precise the human mind becomes, the greater the risk that it will recognize only what it can measure.
Book I gathers this figure into a single formula: “Ahriman is the Architect of materialism.” And it describes the human being who would have given in to him completely:
This portrait must be read with care. It does not target scientists, or atheists, or anyone in particular. The materialism Steiner speaks of is not an opinion you tick on a form: it is a way of inhabiting the world, one anyone can pass through depending on the hour. Ahriman, on this map, is not a camp. He is a slope.
To locate where this slope acts, Steiner describes the human being as made of several nested layers: the physical body; the etheric body or life body, which organizes growth and rhythms; the astral body, seat of emotions and desires; and the I, the hearth of free consciousness. Book I draws on this scheme to locate what interests the Ahrimanic entities: not the body, nor the I, to which they have no direct access, but the layer of the emotions.
Ahrimanic entities: why are they drawn to fear?
Steiner does not speak of Ahriman only as a principle. He also describes beings who serve him, which he sometimes calls spirits of darkness, and which book I names the Ahrimanic entities. In the author’s reading, these entities operate in the etheric layer, the one closest to the physical plane, and are drawn to three specific human states.
The fear of death
The first is the fear of death and of what comes after. Book I describes these entities drawing near to people in moments of great vulnerability — serious illness, grief, inner crisis. But it insists on a nuance that changes everything:
This sentence is worth keeping even for someone who believes in no entity at all. Being afraid is not a fault, nor a weakness, nor the sign of an “attack.” It is a vital reflex. What is problematic, on this map, is not fear itself: it is the volume that never gets turned down, the fear that loops without ever being looked at.
Intellectual materialism
The second state is what book I, following Steiner, calls intellectual materialism: the conviction that only the physical world exists, that consciousness is merely a product of the brain, that death is pure and simple extinction. The author draws a consequence: a person convinced that everything ends lives with a background anguish that is never resolved, and that anguish produces continuously. This is why, in his reading, Ahrimanic entities would have an interest in reinforcing materialism in the culture, not as an ideology but as a stable source.
Spiritual disorientation
The third is disorientation: the state of someone who looks for meaning and finds only chaos, who longs for something greater and meets only emptiness. This state may be the most widespread today. It is the fatigue of those who have lost their bearings and flick from one promise to the next.
Honesty calls for a clarification here. Book I reads these three states as a true “dietetics”: each state would produce an emanation that certain entities consume. This vocabulary of food, harvest and metabolism belongs to the Farmers. Steiner speaks of influences, of forces, of beings that seek to drag humanity toward hardening; the idea that they feed on it is the reading key the author applies to his work, connecting it to Robert Monroe’s Loosh. It is an interpretation, and it should be held as one.
1879 and 1917: the fall of the spirits of darkness
In the autumn of 1917, in the middle of the First World War, Steiner gave a cycle of lectures at Dornach published under the title The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness. In them he recounts an event he places in the spiritual worlds in 1879: a battle at the end of which the archangel Michael is said to have defeated spirits of darkness and cast them out of their realm. But these beings, driven from above, do not vanish. They fall, he says, into the world of humans, and from then on act through their thoughts.
Book I dwells at length on these lectures. It reads in them the announcement of a century in which the influences that harden humanity would no longer pass only through the emotions, but through ideas, systems of thought, mass movements. It notes that Steiner names no particular ideology: he describes a mechanism. And that is exactly how it should be read. The temptation, faced with such a story, is to look for culprits — this party, that group, that people. That is precisely the trap. A mechanism that leans on fear also feeds on the fear of others and on the hunt for enemies. Book I says it plainly elsewhere: the machine needs no conspiracy.
The incarnation of Ahriman: what did the 1919 prediction say?
In 1919, in lectures given notably in Switzerland, Steiner announced that Ahriman would one day incarnate in a human body, in the West, during the third millennium. In his cosmology this is not a figure of speech: just as Christ, in his view, incarnated in Jesus, and Lucifer is said to have incarnated in antiquity, Ahriman would have his own incarnation. Steiner adds that what matters is not to prevent this event, but that humanity not meet it asleep: what counts is the lucidity with which it is recognized.
Book I describes what the world of that incarnation would be: a world in which the boundary between human and machine would fade, in which consciousness would be reduced to what can be calculated, and in which the spiritual dimension of the human being would be “not denied but made literally unthinkable.” The nuance is strong. A denied idea is still an idea: it can still be debated. An unthinkable idea has vanished from the very field of what can be considered.
Then the author builds the bridge to our time. A hundred years later, he writes, we live in a world where algorithms are designed to maximize the emotional engagement of billions of people, where fear, anger and outrage have become the fuel of the attention economy, and where the line between human consciousness and artificial intelligence is actively blurred. That last observation has nothing esoteric about it: it is documented, and we detailed it in the article on social media, anxiety and anger.
This is the soberest way to read the resonance between 1919 and today. There is no need to watch for an individual who would be “Ahriman incarnate,” nor to stick that label on a tech boss or an inventor. What is striking is a tendency: a culture that measures everything, that converts attention into numbers and emotion into yield, and in which it becomes harder and harder to think that a human being might be anything other than a data profile. Whether or not you see in it the hand of a spiritual being, the slope Steiner described is recognizable.
The Farmers’ reading: Ahriman, the Harvesters and the Third Honey
On the map of Les Fermiers, Steiner is not an isolated witness. Book I places him among several sources that, in different languages, would describe the same geography: Robert Monroe and his Loosh, the Gnostics and their Archons, the Kabbalah and its Qliphoth. The author sees in each a piece of the same design: a humanity that produces, through its intense emotions, a substance that other beings collect.
In this design, Ahriman holds a high place: he is “the Architect of materialism,” the one who steers an entire era. The Ahrimanic entities, for their part, play the role book I gives to the Field Harvesters: local agents, with no body, who can amplify an existing fear, sustain a discouragement, stoke an obsession at the moment it yields the most. They create nothing. They turn up the volume. The Farmers’ vocabulary names the substance harvested this way: Ba-Honey for heavy emotions, Hab-Honey for attachments and desires that depend on the outside (see the Honey page).
Book I insists on a point that keeps this reading from turning into a horror film. The Harvesters are not monsters. They are caught in a hierarchy whose summit they cannot see, and they consume because they need to consume. Hunger, the author writes, is not a crime. So there is no holy war to wage and no enemy to bring down. There is a situation to see.
And this is where Steiner makes, according to book I, his most precious contribution: he does not only describe the problem, but what changes the nature of what a human being emits. Artistic work, meditation turned toward living thought, active spiritual knowledge — not believing, but experiencing for oneself. Book I links these practices to what it calls the third honey:
The Third Honey is neither the absence of emotion nor a higher emotion. It is the presence that feels while knowing it feels: the fear is there, whole, but it is seen, and because it is seen, it no longer loops. Book I speaks of lucid non-reaction. In Steiner’s language, you could say it is the central figure of the Dornach sculpture: neither carried upward by Lucifer nor pinned to the ground by Ahriman, but standing between the two.
The author even reports a bolder hypothesis: Steiner is said to have raised the possibility that some Ahrimanic entities might be transformed on contact with a quality they had never encountered. Book I sees in this a sign that the system is not as rigid as it looks. It is a reading, not a dogma. Its practical consequence is simple: the answer to Ahriman is not counterattack. It is sight. Nothing is gained by fighting what feeds on struggle; you simply stop betting.
Steiner is controversial: how can you read him without adhering?
It would be dishonest to present Steiner as a consensual sage. For a century his work has drawn serious criticism, and anyone interested in Ahriman should know about it.
First, Steiner presents his descriptions as a “spiritual science,” but none of them can be verified by scientific methods. Several of his applications are criticized as pseudoscience: certain biodynamic practices, certain remedies of anthroposophic medicine, whose effectiveness has not been demonstrated. Next, in some lectures he made hierarchical statements about human “races” that even his defenders now consider unacceptable, even while placing them in the context of their time. Finally, Waldorf education and the workings of some anthroposophical circles are regularly debated, in France and elsewhere.
Book I, for its part, makes Steiner an “initiate” whose description would be the most precise of all. That is the author’s position; it is not an established fact. Here we report what Steiner said and the way Les Fermiers reads him. We do not thereby subscribe to anthroposophy, and we do not ask you to.
It is in this spirit that the Atanor pairs this subject with card 23, The Black — Dark-buried. Its note speaks of the “dross” and of the shadow sides one must understand in order to let them go. Nothing is less Ahrimanic than a shadow you agree to look at. Ahriman, in the Farmers’ reading, thrives on what stays in the dark; he loses his grip on what is seen.
The full chapter on Steiner is in Les Fermiers, book I (in French).
