Archangel Michael

Finding, Forging and Wielding the Sword

A Michaelmas offering from Bill Trusiewicz

Life is not as idle ore

But as iron dug from central gloom

And heated hot with burning fears

And dipp’t in baths of hissing tears

And battered with the shocks of doom,

To shape and use.

~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

“…Michael’s sword, in the process of being forged, is really carried to an altar under the earth. …There it must be found by receptive souls…”

“It is a fact that in the occult regions of the earth what is prepared by the forging of Michael’s sword is carried to a subterranean altar in the process—to an altar which is invisible and which really exists beneath the earth.”

~ Rudolf Steiner

For Michaelmas season this year I’d like to share some of the fruits of a study I’ve done seeking to penetrate the meaning and purpose of the sword of Michael and discover how it is that we can find, forge, and wield the sword ourselves.

Figure 1: Archangel Michael with the dragon subdued.

Most of us will be familiar with one or another of the many artistic depictions of Michael with his sword, or St. George, perhaps with a sword or spear. St. George is a personification of the spiritual impulse of Michael working on Earth. This impulse has many manifestations. It can be seen in the Mithras rites of the Romans in which case we find images of an initiate riding on the back of a bull, thrusting a knife or sword into the bull. Or we can see the same Michael impulse in the magical sword given to Parsifal and also the holy spear, which can be found in the various grail legends. We won’t be dwelling much on these various images that have come down to us through history except to occasionally borrow one to make a particular point. All of these depictions of the Michael power working in the world can be helpful in explaining the spiritual significance and purpose hidden, and revealed, in the images of the sword, the knife and the spear.

Our focus in this article will be on identifying the spiritual reality that lies behind the sword of Michael or its variations mentioned above, with the goal of outfitting ourselves as ambassadors of Archangel Michael in daily life, to wield the power that he makes available to us as we follow him on his earthly journey to fulfill the various imperatives that he carries out as the leading servant of Christ working in the etheric sphere of the earth.

Figure 2: Raphael’s St. George Fighting the Dragon

To begin, let us review a typical image of Michael and discuss its components keeping our goal in view. A typical image would be Raphael’s St. George Fighting the Dragon. In this artistic representation we see St. George, outfitted as a black knight riding on a white stallion engaged in battle with a dragon being held at bay below him by his spear. In the background we see a woman with a halo holding her folded hands over her heart in an expression of prayer.

The scenario in which the sword of Michael (or in this case the spear of St. George) appears, is meant to conjure an inner picture of the Archangel as the protector of the Virgin Sophia or the human soul—represented by the woman in reverent attitude (right center). The white horse is the strength of good; the dark armor represents the dark task; the dragon represents the lower human nature or strength of evil; and the spear is the weapon wielded to overcome evil.

In order to understand the deep significance of the various elements represented here we must put before our inner spirit vision a scenario that extends far beyond what is pictured in this painting for our outer senses. We must overcome our natural tendency to understand ourselves as being contained within our skin, what our normal, daylight consciousness tells us. We need to have a picture of the part of us that extends deep into the earth and the part of us that extends far into the heavens. For this we must employ what may be called our “night consciousness.” Through night consciousness we are aware that we are both heavenly and earthly beings. We have a physical body that we share with the earth that invisibly penetrates deep into the earth soul. And we have a spiritual nature, a heavenly nature that allows us passage to the infinite— the world of stars that is not bound to earthly matter.

We can imagine our soul-spiritual nature as an extension of our selves, a sort of invisible “limb” that projects deep into the earth. This “appendage,” if you will forgive the grotesqueness of the image, is elemental in nature; it consists of the same stuff as the invisible world of the elements that exists on the physical planet earth. This real part of us works in us unconsciously before we are initiated. It works in our will and feeling life, in our sleeping and dreaming life. We must understand that we have the earth in us and the earth has us in it. Our soul nature works down into the elements as a sort of root embedded in the many layers of the earth’s body. Spiritual science teaches us that this elemental nature that extends deep into the earth is a part of us that remains behind on earth when we die. Shortly before we cross the threshold at death this part of us disconnects and lodges within the earth for a time until we return again into earthly incarnation. When we descend from our heavenly journey between earthly lives into a new body, we reunite with this shadow-being we left behind. This being is referred to as our double or doppelganger.

To understand the sword of Michael we must have a working knowledge of how it is forged under the earth at an altar there; we must have first-hand knowledge of our double and its connection with the underworld. Without this knowledge all that we discuss in this paper will be concepts, dry-as-dust concepts perhaps, but concepts nevertheless, which can conceive when they are fructified in us and so produce illuminated and living knowledge. We all possess ample raw material to begin the inner work that characterizes every step of our getting to know Archangel Michael; so let us “forge” ahead.

Figure 3: Blacksmith forging metal on his anvil. (Artist unknown)

We have begun this article with three quotations to set the stage for our study. As indicated in the third quotation, Rudolf Steiner says: “Michael’s Sword, in the process of being forged, is really carried to an altar under the earth…. there it must be found by receptive souls.”

The first task we have set for ourselves, the forging of Michael’s sword, is a process, of which we likely have some experience since the forging process is a natural part of life. We may have begun this process knowingly or we may have begun without knowing it. Whether we know it or not has much to do with how much we have encountered in language that resonates with our deep unconscious or semi-conscious experiences of suffering. Most of us will have had plenty of experience that can form a basis for knowledge of the forging of the sword of Michael. In any case, if we are to wield the sword of Michael to the greatest effect, we must find it; we must bring it to the altar beneath the earth; and we must forge it; and we must do so, as much as possible, in clear, daylight, consciousness.

What is this forging and how are we to do it? Rudolf Steiner speaks at length about Archangel Michael and his mission but about the sword of Michael I could find little more than the two quotations cited. What can help us is what he says about another sword—Parsifal’s sword, which we will return to later. In any case, Alfred Lord Tennyson and the modern poet Arvia Mackaye Ege both have something to say that is also of interest to us, towards understanding the process of forging the sword.

But, before we discuss how to forge the sword of Michael, we should grasp the nature of the sword and its function otherwise we won’t know what or why we are forging it. Considering the nature of the sword let us look at a sentence from a letter recorded in the New Testament, probably by St. Paul, to the Hebrews in the first century AD.

“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” 

Hebrews 4:12, New International Version

Figure 4: Archangel Michael trampling dragon under foot; Raphael

Let us also consider what Rudolf Steiner said in the classroom of the Waldorf teacher, Walter Johannes Stein. He explained to the class that the sword given to Parsifal was a magical sword and that the Grail Knights were not “Knights of the Sword” like Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table but were “Knights of the Word.” He was saying to the class that Parsifal’s magical sword was “the Word.” This is especially significant for those of us who are students of spiritual science since spiritual science is considered the modern science of the Grail.

Referring to the New Testament again, to the first chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ to St. John, in which Christ appears to John in a vision, we can read the following words “out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword.” If we consider the tasks of Archangel Michael in relation to Christ we cannot fail to see, in the biblical references to “the sword of the word,” the correspondence between the sword of Michael and the sword of the Word.

Figure 5: Two-Edged sword.

Before we plunge into our journey towards forging the sword of Michael in the depths let us consider the important characterization of the sword as “two-edged,” which occurs in both biblical references we have cited. When we begin the work of forging the sword of Michael we inevitably confront its dual nature: its two edges. What does this indicate? Why two edges? If we understand the nature of the human ego we will be able to comprehend this double aspect. The human being stands, quite significantly, between heaven and earth. Being human is an activity that takes place “in the middle” between two polar opposites. This has been illustrated most aptly in a story written by Ovid in the first century BC. It is the story of Daedalus and Icarus his son. Let us recall the story:

Daedalus was imprisoned by King Minos on the Island of Crete, far from his homeland in Greece. Minos was the king of what we now call the Minoan empire whose capital was Crete, at a time when the Minoans were the most significant world power; they had a great and powerful navy controlling the Mediterranean Sea, which was their stronghold, as well as regions far inland. Minos detained Daedalus employing his many talents as an artisan and inventor to prosper his kingdom. Among the things he built were a Labyrinth for Minos and a large wooden cow for his wife Pasiphae. Daedalus also invented two flying machines out of feathers attached with strings and wax, a machine that he intended to use to escape from Crete with his son Icarus. From the tower in which he was imprisoned he said to his son Icarus, something like this: Dear son, King Minos may control the waters of the Mediterranean and the lands surrounding it but he does not control the air. I have made us flying machines that can take us to our homeland; but before we set off to freedom promise me that you will follow my instructions. Do not fly too high, too close to the sun, or the gods of heaven will melt the wax that holds the feathers on your wings and you will plunge into the sea. And do not fly too low, too close to the sea; for the gods of the earth and seas will encompass you with mist, will leaden the feathers on your wings and you will be lost in its depths. But follow me; take a middle path between the two and we will safely reach our beloved homeland together.

Ovid was delivering a layered message. It was an imagination of the new forces of thought, of intelligence, that he and others of his race were spearheading during the period of the declining age of Taurus, the Bull and the rising age of Aries, the ram, at the time when a new intellectuality was to give birth to philosophy in Greece. And in this story he wisely predicted the inevitable downfall of abstract thinking, of intellectuality that has vertigo and flies too far from the earth and the human being. Clearly, in the story, he identifies the human path as the “middle path” by referring to himself saying “follow me.”

The point we want to make is: in ego development, in the development of the human individual, one always stands between two opposing forces. The liberating course is always found “in the middle.” Every moral choice that we encounter engenders the possibility of leaning too far in one or in another direction. So the double-edged sword is used in both directions to keep the extremes of “earth” and “heaven” at bay and to make a clear way between the two. When we speak of forging our sword, we refer to a process that occurs in communion between the “Christ I” and our “human I.” In this communion we are incorporating forces of Christ into ourselves, forces that alone can produce the strength that we see in Archangel Michael, powerful forces “forged” into our thinking and our actions. Christ orchestrates the “balance of soul” we need since his powers “hold sway in the rhythm of worlds,” safely between the extremes, to quote from Rudolf Steiner’s Foundation Stone Meditation.

Figure 6: Hot iron being shaped on an anvil.

These are some of the clues to the sword of Michael, its nature, and use, clues that deserve to be contemplated. But we have yet to substantially address the difficult task of forging the sword on an altar in the subterranean world. To approach this task let us take a closer look at Tennyson’s words that appear at the beginning of this article.

Life is not as idle ore

But as iron dug from central gloom,

And heated hot with burning fears,

And dipp’t in baths of hissing tears,

And battered with the shocks of doom,

To shape and use.

Here we can begin to see the forging of iron—“to shape and use.” We can see that this is a matter of the soul presented in the terms of the smithy, the one whose task it is to forge an implement of “use,” like a sword. What else can we glean from these verses?

We have a clue to the location of the “smithy shop,” if you will, where the process of forging takes place: “central gloom.” We might safely understand central gloom to be in subterranean regions where one finds the “idle ore,” and also, from which the “iron [is] dug.” We need to enter with feeling into the words of the poem that identify the location of the smith and the forging work. As we do so we may glimpse our invisible connection to subterranean regions, the aspect of our humanity that reaches beyond our skin and deep into the earth. The work accomplished in the subterranean smithy occurs both in us and deep in the earth. We must come to terms with these odd facts to have a working relationship with them. We must be able to descend to “central gloom” and to witness the “shocks of doom,” the shaping blows of the hammer of fate that take place there.

The key to what happens in the underworld is not clearly stated here but it is assumed. What is assumed is the altar: the place of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the key to the work of forging. Tennyson is writing to enlightened souls who willingly submit or at least are willing to acknowledge being shaped in such a manner, to serve a noble task. The altar might well be compared to an anvil that a soul willingly places herself upon. The key to the work of forging the sword is willing sacrifice. As we know, the blows of fate reach us all and these blows very often have a forging and shaping effect on our soul especially as we becomes conscious of the process. The forging of the sword of Michael is predicated on conscious sacrifice of our old nature to be renewed and reshaped for specific “use.” The initiate soul does not wait for the blows of fate to shape her but joins the smith in his wise karmic work; she learns to apply the fire that makes the metal malleable and receptive to the hammer blows; she yields herself willingly at the anvil altar.

We can easily see in this the shaping of our character but how do we understand this forging process to be the work of shaping the sword of Michael? This process of shaping our character can only occur by means of the sword, as we will see as we go back to the New Testament verses concerning the “sword of the spirit” from the letter to the Hebrews.

Reviewing the verse we read earlier, “sharper than any two-edged sword, it penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit.” These words refer to the crucial, conscious activity of soul that can discern the difference between soul activity originating in the unconsciousness or sleepy condition of will and feeling—out of the “enchanted inner weaving,” to use a term that Rudolf Steiner was fond of; or a spirit-originating activity that is completely conscious and able to be clothed in clear thought-pictures or words. Unconscious soul activity can only be partly illuminated in the words of a person who experiences them. They can only be dimly referred to out of a sleepy consciousness. While conscious soul activity is by nature illumined much like the outer world that is visible in broad daylight and can be described in detail. This is the meaning of piercing “to the dividing of soul and spirit, of joint and marrow.” To be able to illuminate activities that ordinarily have their source in unconsciousness, activities that have a compelling and un-free aspect, is to be able to fully illuminate one’s consciousness. In other words to be able to live free of karmic pressures, or we might say, to work out our karma consciously and thereby be free. To be able to “divide soul and spirit” means that we can be directed solely by spirit and be freed from the constraints imposed upon our souls through unconscious feeling and will forces that conflict with spirit wisdom.

An example might be the inevitable appearance of a mid-life crisis. Awake or not every person reaches a point in life when a sort of scale of consciousness tips in a new direction based on our age. We become conscious of our impending death or at least our proximity to it. Most of us will experience some crisis that precipitates this awareness. It may be a serious illness, or an accident, or the surfacing of psychological time-bombs that are starting to ignite. Whatever it is it will require our attention at the very least. An awakened person will foresee such things before they occur and will be ready for them. They will not be caught completely off guard. And when the crisis occurs they will know what must be done to meet it from a place of inner strength, which will come after humiliation, after humbling ourselves. Such crises are precipitated precisely because we need humbling; we need to have a meeting with death so that we will eventually be able to meet our final death without fear. This is the wisdom of our higher self working. Here we get a chance to illuminate unconscious forces, compelling and un-free forces in us, karmic forces that are binding us, and work through to freedom. This is an example of “dividing soul from spirit:” when we are able to free ourselves from soul enslavement with spirit vision and wisdom.

Using ancient terminology, the writer of this letter to the Hebrews, besides referring to soul and spirit, also refers to the “joints and marrow.” Such words as these help us to understand how our predecessors, as a matter of course, wove together physical and soul characteristics. The joints refer to the points of pressure that yield to the impulses of will to produce motion in the physical human being. The marrow refers to the innermost bone substance that was understood to be the origin of the will forces. Today we know that the blood is manufactured in the marrow of the bones, that the bones, which are a symbol of death, have a living core, a core that is crucial to sustaining the life of the body, as well as its soul and spirit life in which the human “I being” dwells—for the blood is the vehicle for our “I.” We see here how our ancient predecessors intuited this “livingness” in the bones, of which Rudolf Steiner said: “You will in fact not understand what is said in the book about thinking [The Philosophy of Freedom], unless you know that man experiences thought by means of an inner experience of his skeleton.” To supplement this perhaps surprising thought, we have Steiner’s re-phrasing of an ancient dictum from the mysteries:

Behold the man of bone,

And thou beholdest Death.

Look within the bones,

And thou beholdest the Awakener—

Here we see that when the writer to the Hebrews used the terms “joints and marrow” he was referring to mystery wisdom that further clarified and enriched the meanings of “soul and spirit.” With these we have arrived at the seed-thoughts we have been seeking in our reference to the process of forging the sword of Michael at an altar in the depths of the earth. The source of the ability to destroy and create, the “Death” and “awakener” principals are seen in the forged sword that: “is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,” as the King James Version renders the Greek text. Thoughts and intents refer here to the deepest springs of our actions. Here we see the possibility of developing our ability to unite ourselves with the spiritual source of truth, the sword of the spirit—the Word, which is the weapon used to concentrate the
Michaelic impulse molding our character to be equipped to fight against evil, against untruth and unreality.

It is at the altar in the subterranean world that we are able to “discern the thoughts and intents of the heart,” if and only if we have the courage to confront our double and make the requisite sacrifice to experience the “dying and becoming,” that defines the process of forging the sword; putting to death the unconscious impulses of soul and awakening to clear light of thought—to spirit. The forged sword of Michael is the means by which we discern intentions that have their source either in unconsciousness of soul or in free creative thinking that springs from spirit. To complete our picture of the altar in the depths we should explain its sacramental nature.

What appears on every altar as well as on the anvil/altar, and which is central to the process of forging the sword/word, is bread and wine. The bread and wine are the concept and the percept—the “dry” concept and the “wet” percept. Picture Christ at the Last Supper dipping the bread in the wine-water mixture and giving it to his disciples and you have a picture of the nourishing quality of higher cognition, a picture of the power of uniting concept with percept, the head with the heart. If we are to understand this principle of dying and becoming in the context of forging the Word-Sword we will see that there is a death element in the bread/concept when it remains alone, as a dry-morsel: rigid, inflexible and devoid of life. The “dry” concept must be wedded to the “wet” percept in order to overcome its deathly, dry, quality. And correspondingly, but in reverse, the wine/percept is alive and mobile and has a fluid quality, which while bringing a lively element into the alchemy of higher wisdom, it also has a characteristic looseness that lacks structure and definition as its deathly quality. When the percept is united to the concept, through the dipping of the sop, it gains substance, definition, and structure. And when the dry concept is united to the percept it receives life and mobility. So we can see that both concept and percept must sacrifice something of their nature, the deathly aspect of their nature to together create the Sword of the Word that is the power of spiritual intelligence that characterizes Michaelic invincibility—the concentrated power of the sword/word. A statement by Rudolf Steiner corroborates our picture of the sacraments that appear on the altar in the depths: “Thinking is a communion of the human being. Knowledge/cognition, when it is real knowledge /cognition, becomes a sacrament.”

Figure 7: Mosaic of Jesus holding the bread and wine at the Last Supper.

We might further understand this marriage of concept and percept as the heating and cooling of the iron that steels and tempers the word that lives in us. Tennyson refers to this as “heating hot with burning fears” and being “dipp’t in baths of hissing tears.” In reality, when one enters fully into the process of forging the sword consciously, we ourselves participate by subjecting our word pictures and ideas to the fire of spirit; we bring this ore that the soul uses to sheath our concepts and subject it to the fire to make it soft and pliable, to make it yielding to the work of the hammer. And once it is reshaped according to cosmic law we then dip it into water to cool so that it maintains its shape. Let us borrow a few verses from Arvia Mackaye Ege’s poem The Secret Iron of the Heart, to enliven our image further adding percept to concept through the intensified language of poetry.

As iron in the flame is wrought

To cool at length with keener strength,

So mold me mighty master

In the white heat of disaster.

Forge with living art the secret iron of my heart.

In burning trial temper the bright metal of my will.

With faultless skill hammer the gleaming contours

Of clear thought—

Delicate exact—

Upon the anvil of unalterable fact.

These words can help us to understand more deeply something that wants to remain superficial in the description. We tend to think only conceptually of the ideas and word pictures that are being shaped in this forging and therefore miss the human drama that inevitably accompanies the process. Ege says: “In burning trials/ temper the bright metal of my will.” [emphasis mine] It is important to realize that our inner being consists of ideas and word pictures that are embedded in our wills; they have been shaped by the karma of our previous experiences into a sort of script. This script is the ore of the secret iron buried in the earth of our beings in our mostly unconscious will forces. If we can get a feeling for these ideas and word pictures as united with our will forces we will be able to understand the human drama involved in forging the sword, the bloody and bone-breaking sacrifice, if you will excuse the expression, that must occur to produce the “gleaming contours of clear thought” that characterizes the sword/word of Michael.

Figure 8: The Brazen Sea or Molten Sea of Solomon’s Temple. (Artist’s rendition)

So far we have been speaking of the forging process as illuminating our unconscious, what we might call our karmic script, which tends to occur under circumstances that happen to us. By this I refer to the “burning trials” and the “white heat of disaster” of Ege’s poem and Tennyson’s “battered with the shocks of doom” aspect in which we see the unconscious world impinging upon us in a dramatic way. We should further note here, that for an initiate even, the experience of forging need not occur in such a way. Initiates inevitably confront heavy blows of fate in events that occur from time to time since they share the karma of the world as a whole. The initiate is able to foresee them and transform them into gifts by meeting them in the right way. As an example let us review the scenario depicted in the Temple Legend.

Hiram, the master builder of the Temple of Solomon, prepared the casting of a Molten Sea as the culmination of his achievements on the temple, but his enemies destroyed it by altering the process of the casting, deliberately not following Hiram’s instructions. As the casting was flowing into the huge laver that was prepared for it, it exploded, raining fire in the courtyard of the Temple where many were gathered to observe. But Hiram confronted the fire, as only an initiate could do: he leapt into the flames where, at the center of the Earth, he met Tubal Cain and Cain his ancestor who gave him a magical hammer and a golden triangle by which he might repair and make good his casting. Besides the tremendous significance of this story, which we need not go into here, it illustrates how an initiate turns a meeting with “central gloom,” “the shocks of doom” or “the white heat of disaster” to use our examples from Tennyson and Ege, into a transformative experience in which he rises “forged on the anvil” of the experience, to a higher “use,” or we might say, with newly forged tools, gifts, as in this case with a hammer and a triangle.

The initiate is the ultimate observer, not overcome by his experience but able to watch as it unfolds and confronts him and thus to act as best suits the situation. Illnesses, for instance, are understood by the initiate from their spiritual sources and can be healed or avoided through meditative work. That is why it is said that high initiates are generally above illnesses and actually choose their death.

Figure 9: Archangel Michael with foot on Satan’s head. (Guido Reni)

Earlier in this article we said of the sword: “we must find it; we must bring it to the altar beneath the earth; and we must forge it.” We subsequently discussed the forging of the sword at some length and the altar beneath the earth but we have not yet addressed directly the matter of finding it. To normal everyday thinking we would expect to find the sword only after it was forged. But for spiritual matters it is otherwise. We find the sword, forge the sword, and offer ourselves at the altar in one stroke, all at the same time. No forging takes place without a sacrifice upon the altar; and no sword can be found until it is first wrought in the fire of spirit. It is found as it is wrought. Here we must dispense with our usual ideas of time and space and cause and effect.

Let us now step back from our focus on the sword and look again at the complete image of Michael fighting with the dragon to see what it can teach us of the use of the sword. In almost every case without exception, in depictions of Michael or St. George fighting the dragon, we are witnessing, not infernal regions in the depths of the earth, but a fight that happens in daylight on the surface of the earth. This shows us that once the sword (or the spear) has been forged it is something that can be used in everyday life. Taking a grown-up perspective on these images, we are aware that the dragons depicted are not physical, material adversaries that exist in the sense world but representations of lower, soul-spiritual, entities that exist in the human being, in our human nature that is connected with the earth. In some depictions we see the head of Satan beneath the foot of Michael. (See Figure 9) Or he may be standing on or have one foot on the dragon. (See Figure 4) Sometimes Michael is pictured holding a chain. When St. George is shown on a horse often he wields a long spear with which he holds the dragon down. (See Figure 1) The dragons depicted are coiling, undulating, powerful, and fierce beings rising up from below. What we witness in these pictures of dragons is a representation of the elemental being that lives in the depths and also in us—as we discussed earlier. If we will look at these artistic images as they are intended to be seen, from a spiritual perspective the fact that we see the dragon (or Satan) at all must be understood as evidence of spiritual vision. We are witnessing the struggle for possession of the human soul that takes place invisibly every day in the midst of life on earth.

As many of us are aware, this “holding the dragon down” is a gesture with significance. The dragon is not to be slain. We can find various depictions of Michael holding a chain, in which we see the important fact that he means to bind Satan or the devil and not to destroy him. Satan and the devil, that is, Ahriman and Lucifer have their function in human evolution, without these beings we would not be able to progress spiritually. If, for instance, we were to think it a proper course of action to repudiate Ahriman, to dispense with everything in our life that is Ahrimanic, or holding that intention at least, we would surely deviate in the opposite direction for without Ahriman our lives would turn decidedly towards the Luciferic. So the task of Archangel Michael is to bind both Satan and the devil to their lawful domains where, at a point of balance between the two, humanity can evolve in the right way as we discussed earlier in the context of the “two-edged sword.” Here we see the special significance of depictions, in which Michael does not kill the dragon but stands upon or holds the dragon or Satan under his foot. (See Figure 9)

Let us turn back to the images of the deathly forces being sacrificed on the altar to further our understanding of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences that must be bound to their rightful domains. Lucifer, who in the religious tradition of the West is called “the devil” works in the astral world or what we sometimes call the elemental world, to tempt us through the senses to an unrestrained, too fluid and lively relationship to the world of the senses, to an un-tempered disposition of thought and feeling, falling short of the bounds of moral law. The redeemed Luciferic, of which Rudolf Steiner often spoke, can be seen in the sop that has taken up the wine and given shape and form to it by the bread, according to cosmic/human law. In the sop of bread we see astrality (Luciferic) working through the etheric realm (Ahrimanic), in the healthy growth of nature in animal and human life, according to the spiritual aims of world becoming. The Ahrimanic or Satanic adversarial forces, on the other hand, when they are unrestrained, harden, rigidify and slay what lives in the etheric and hold back what can rise spiritually out of nature, what can undergo transformation when influenced by spirit. On the other hand, we can see that Ahriman provides a necessary force within the bounds of cosmic spiritual law, in upholding physical shape and order in the human being and the larger world of nature while we have material existence—during incarnation. Here, the Ahrimanic works as a consolidating, cohesive force yielding stable forms. Ahriman is called the lord of death. To the esotericist death is part of life; that is death and life are two poles of an unending process that are encompassed within the enduring consciousness of spirit. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the preponderance of form, the sclerotic tendency of the Ahrimanic influence is deadly when mobility and flexibility is called for to maintain life. The bread dipped in the wine is the Ahrimanic principle of form enlivened by the wine of the spirit so that it can move in the astrality that supports ego development. Here we see the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces working for us within their rightful domains as an aid to human spiritual evolution.

The forging of the two-edged sword/word of Michael is the means by which the ambassadors of the Archangel in the world keep the two adversarial forces at bay to our left and to our right we might say. Finding the sword forged in the depths is our guarantee that we will not fall prey to wrong thinking; it is our means to maintain communion with the spirit in all that we do and think. In the words of St. Paul from the first century of the Christian era: “The weapons of our warfare [of which the sword of the spirit is one] are not physical but mighty through God for the casting down of imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing captive every thought to the obedience of Christ.

This concludes our study of Archangel Michael: How Can We Know Him? Finding, Forging, and Wielding the Sword. May the spirit light of worlds guide us to the altar beneath the earth where kinship with Archangel Michael is wrought, so that together we will be found wielding the Sword of the Word, appropriately outfitted as modern Grail Knights to protect modern pilgrims on their journey to the Temple of Humanity.