The Archangel Michael: His Mission and Ours

by Rudolf Steiner, Christopher Bamford (Introduction)

“The Michael age has dawned. Hearts begin to have thoughts. Enthusiasm no longer flows from mystical obscurity, but from the inner clarity that thought conveys. To grasp this is to receive Michael into one’s soul. Thoughts that today seek to grasp the spirit must spring from hearts that beat for Michael as the fiery cosmic prince of thought.” ― Rudolf Steiner For centuries, the tradition of the “mystical chronology” of the world’s seven archangelic regents has been part of Western esoteric teaching. According to this tradition, 1879 marked the return of the solar spirit Michael―the archangel of the Sun―to oversee earthly evolution. Steiner always placed his life and work in the service of Michael’s evolutionary task. And he recognized that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, humanity emerged from the Kali Yuga―the Dark Age―and entered the Age of Light. Against this background, Steiner described the ascent of Michael as cosmic ruler, his battle with the “dragon” of the spirits of darkness, and his roles as the countenance of Christ and the guardian of cosmic intelligence. He also gave many profound indications of how Michael’s evolutionary task depends on the free and independent collaboration of human coworkers. Speaking on behalf of Michael, Steiner laid out the essentials for a new Michaelic path to full humanity. Among the elements of this path are the development of selfless individuality; cosmopolitanism; the practice of the presence of Christ; fearlessness; the transformation of thinking and perception in a new synthesis of science, art, and religion; the spiritualization of space; and the separation of thought from language. The Archangel Michael gathers most of Steiner’s statements on this subject, making it an important source for coming to terms with today’s political, social, psychological, and spiritual crises.

Genres: Spirituality, Occult

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Roger Buck]

For reasons indicated here: http://corjesusacratissimum.org/2011/... ...

I do not even want to rate this book. My views on Steiner are so complex and so likely to be misunderstood that I prefer not to reduce them to soundbites.

I simply want to say I have read this book and that whilst Steiner served to free me from Eastern Theosophy and the New Age scene I found at Findhorn, Valentin Tomberg, in turn, provided me with a very different hermeneutic with which to engage Steiner.

I hope the above link however can contribute a little to the tangled issues involving Steiner and Tomberg - and why I believe this "very different hermeneutic" is necessary for a world plunging into a cold-as-steel mechanised society ...

[Marcel Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve always loved Rudolf Steiner books, with Cosmic Memory and Spiritual Hierarchies being a must read for any true seeker on the spiritual path. However I thought his book The Archangel Michael did not flow in the way his other books have read in the past, mostly because Steiner did not actually sit down and write this as book but rather it is a series of essays and workshop notes that have been compiled after his death to read like a book. For this reason I found some of it repetitive at times or indeed more difficult to follow because there was not the usual ‘building’ of awareness and connection to the essence of his wisdom and experience. Nonetheless I’m glad I read it and like always with a Steiner took much from it.

[Ryan Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most powerful and most urgent collection of lectures I've ever read from Rudolf Steiner.

[Gabriellopesz · Rating 5 out of 5]

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