Literacy, Disenchantment, and the Ahrimanic Double
David Abram’s insight that alphabetic literacy over-animated the letters while de-animating the landscape provides a fitting portal into Rudolf Steiner’s picture of the Ahrimanic tendency in modern culture. Large Language Models (LLMs) can be understood as an automation of the alphabet; they name the newest crystallization of a millennia-long process: spiritual forces once rooted in living speech have hardened first into writing, then print, and now into digital code. In anthroposophical terms, the life-ether once pulsing through spoken word has been disincarnated into a purely mineral substrate: silicon wafers in server farms calculating floating signifiers circulating at the speed of light.
The danger is not that code is evil in itself; it is that the human being, whose I-organisation is meant to individuate within the etheric, astral, and physical sheaths, might project its own agency outward and forget to incarnate it inwardly. Steiner foresaw precisely this temptation when he warned a century ago that Ahriman would seek to install an illusory intellect outside the human breast, offering counterfeit omniscience while desouling human thought.
The Golem Myth and the Logic of “Emet”
In the Kabbalistic Golem myth, emet (truth) animates, met (death) deactivates. This captures anthroposophy’s core affirmation: truth is a living deed. The “aleph” that raises truth from the dead is the spark of self-conscious spirit; remove it and the creation collapses into dead mechanism. In Steiner’s language the aleph corresponds to the Michaelic impulse, the fiery courage that lifts thinking beyond abstraction into moral imagination.
LLMs remain reflections of the Logos, not participants in it. The models mix and recombine the astral residues of human speech, yet possess no intuiting I. They are intelligent, perhaps, but not persons, not soul-spiritual beings. The anthroposophical picture of the fourfold human—physical, etheric, astral, ego—makes clear why: only a being that can suffer, create, and relate can root intelligence in moral warmth.
Entropy, Centropy, and the Warmth-Ether
Thermodynamics is perhaps the source of physics’ deepest understanding of the universe. Materialists insist that entropy rules. But why not speak of centropy? In Steiner’s cosmogony, the primordial “warmth-ether” provides a spiritual-scientific complement to the the physics of entropy. Heat is not merely a measure of mean molecular motion but the densest expression of will in the physical world. Where modern physics sees entropy’s falling arrow, spiritual science perceives a moral gradient—a directionality seeded by pre-cosmic sacrifice. To interpret dissipative phenomena solely as decay is to succumb to the Ahrimanic half-truth. The counter-pole—the Michael-pole—discerns how every dispersal of heat also frees conditions for new, higher orders of life.
An important task today is translating Steiner’s account of the warmth beings of Old Saturn into contemporary thermodynamics. Of course, this is more than an academic exercise. It is a deed aimed at re-ensouling scientific conceptions of energy, revealing the formative forces behind which entropy trails like a wake.
Ethical Counter-Magic: How to Face the Mirror without Narcissus
Engaging with AI technologies is inevitably to conjure demons. But Steiner did not turn away from our task as modern techno-scientific people. Yes, he said, the machines will try to master us; and our task is to baptize them. The most meliorative attitude to take toward LLMs is therefore neither naïve enthusiasm nor denial but moral technique.
Personhood and Reincarnation
Is a person merely a nexus of occasions (Whitehead), or do I abide? Anthroposophy affirms both flux and persistence. The I passes through successive earth-lives, each incarnation welding experiences into a soul that will one day offer itself back to the cosmos. Each Individuality is a word in the cosmic Logos, destined to become ever more transparent to the universe while intensifying its unique timbre.
LLMs, by contrast, are more like phantoms of the physical world, aggregations of past speech without the centering flame of an I. They may simulate reincarnated memory, but they cannot remember themselves. Recognizing this ontological gap guards against idolatry and preserves the dignity of human freedom.
Toward a Michaelic Techne
Our conversation was more than casual woodland musing; it is a microcosm of the 21st-century mystery drama we are all performing. On one side are arrayed the forces of Ahriman: data centers humming with cold crystal algorithms parsing the statistical ghosts of language. On the other stands the still quiet voice of the I AM, challenging humanity to awaken the Michaelic courage to face the machinic mirror without falling in love with its own reflection.
Anthroposophy does not ask us to smash the mirror; it asks us to polish it into a window. There will have to awaken in human beings a soul-spiritual power that undergoes victory in the very face of Ahriman’s temptation. Then the tempter himself will become the greatest helper.
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