Darkness

From AnthroWiki

Darkness is in the spiritual-scientific sense not merely to be understood as the absence of light, but is a formative force that polarically opposes the light. The Spirits of Darkness work in it. These are primarily ahrimanic, but also asuric spiritual beings, whereby the latter as Spirits of the Night (Hebrew: לילה Laj'lah "night") served the Elohim in their work of creation. They have retained certain characteristics from the Old Saturnian existence, where there was still no light and the whole world was plunged into darkness. This condition was repeated on the 1st day of creation, where it says in Genesis:

„1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.“

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also speaks of this polarity of light and darkness in his Theory of Colours:

„Underlying what Goethe's Theory of Colours contains is the secret of the interaction of light and darkness as two polar essential entities in the world. And that which today is fantastically called the concept of matter, which does not exist at all as it is imagined, but is an illusion, is something that hides itself as a spiritual being wherever the polar opposite of light, darkness, appears. In truth, what is called the physical concept of matter is a phantasm. In the regions of space where, as physics says, one has to look for what haunts as matter, there is in truth nothing but a certain degree of darkness. And this dark space is filled with soul-spiritual essence, which is related to what is already stated in Genesis, where the total mass of this soul-spirit is characterised by darkness and where it is said that this darkness waves over elementary existence. All these things lie much deeper than present-day natural science can dream of. So when we speak of darkness in Genesis, we have to do with the revelation of the retarded saturnine beings, and when we speak of light, we have to do with the revelation of the advanced beings. These work and weave into each other.“ (Lit.:GA 122, p. 96f)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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