Much confusion surrounds the mysteries of Babylon referred to in The Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine. The Whore of Babylon, described in this book, is not just an historical reference, but also a timeless picture of the way the Ancient Babylonians “fell” into the control of evil demons. The apocalyptic view of Revelations is a timeless description of the spiritual development of humanity and the individual. The insights found in this book are as true today as they were when the author wrote his visions of the ‘past, the present, and the future.’ The Whore of Babylon is a 4,000 year-old tradition that clearly describes what happens to a person who is part of the “Fall of Babylon.” This is best described in the works of Rudolf Steiner and especially in his lectures to Christian Community priests who were trying to understand the meaning of these spiritual imaginations of human evolution and the battle between good and evil.

The worship of Baal, Mammon, Asmodeus, Satan, Lucifer, and Molech overthrew the Ancient Babylonian worship of cosmic deities found working in the planets and stars. The worship of demons, instead of cosmic beings, constitutes what is called “The Fall of Babylon.” This fall into demon worship is well documented in history and created the foundations of the same evil found in the world today. The blood sacrifice of humans, worship of money, war, prideful power-mongering, perverted sexual practices, and selfish hatred of others has an unbroken history since its institutionalization in Babylon. These evil practices were openly conducted and supported by the laws of Hammurabi. Vile banking practices, debtor’s prison, usury, taxes, prostitution, political control of society by a wealthy elite, abnegation of wholesome spiritual beings, and the unceasing promulgation of war are now institutions held in great esteem throughout our modern world by those in control.

The writer of the Apocalypse indicates that the Whore of Babylon will eventually fall, along with the fall of the Beast (Materialism) and his False Prophet (Ahriman), as well as the fall of Satan himself. Evil will be overcome in the long run but the initial fall of the individual into “Babylon” comes before the conquering of these evil forces.

This evil is obviously happening in our world around us with each person being offered the ‘Fall into Babylon’ as a daily choice. The “City of Babylon” has been around since 2000 BC developing a world-wide network of Satanic followers who use the ancient institutions of Babylon to maintain a powerful network of evil social, economic, political, and cultural organizations that have been continuously in control of the physical world for 4000 years. These bankers, tax-collectors, warmongers, and political elite refuse to let their personal aggrandizement be deterred from world domination. They are literally an evil lineage of banking families that are hidden behind most of the world’s worshipers of money, power, and control.

The good news in this story is that once the enemies of humanity, who are possessed by ancient demons, are called out by the truth and brought into the light, they will become part of the Fall of the Whore of Babylon which will end the materialistic domination of the world. St. John the Divine is clearly hopeful that Babylon will fall as the demon possessed worshipers meet their personal tribulations and judgments spelled out in the Apocalypse. To know the pathways of evil is a key to freeing oneself from the control of these demon-possessed warlords who have taken hold of the power centers of the material world. To exorcise a demon-possessed person is the work of the divine but the rejection of these beings and forces is the job of each individual who frees themself from the control of the demons of the seven deadly sins that bind the soul and spirit to the dark forces working against human spiritual evolution. No demon can enter the body, soul, or spirit of an individual who has the love of Christ in their heart and the will of the divine in their actions. Babylon will fall, along with the Beast and its False Prophet, thereby ending Satan’s control of the material world.

Rudolf Steiner gives us the history of how this “falling into evil” happened in Ancient Babylon and the way it continues into our present time. He informs us that evil can arise in the human being through unconscious actions that are devoid of spiritual thinking and feeling. These actions can become vessels for demons that eventually take complete control of the entire human being. Evil can either arise from the darkness of human souls worshiping materialistic deadly sins or can descend from fallen hierarchical beings who wish to destroy the divine intentions for human spiritual development. Knowing the different approaches of evil is helpful in combatting the forces impinging upon the constitution of the human body, soul, and spirit in our times. This knowledge is the key to eradicating the demonic influences that we find around us in everyday life that desire to turn humans into evil animals instead of spiritual angels. The pathways of evil and good are clear, the decision of which road to take is incumbent upon the free choices of humans. No evil can touch a human spirit unless they are invited into a person whose actions align with the mission of these Babylonian demons.

Let’s take a look at the origins and paths of these Babylonian evil beings described by Rudolf Steiner in a lecture he gave to Christian Community priests who were struggling to understand these forces of evil in our world.

The following condensation of Steiner’s indications is taken from: Lectures to Priests: The Apocalypse, Lecture XI, September 15, 1924, Dornach, GA 346.

“There are three stages which we must become familiar with which represent something which must fall before mankind will become worthy and capable of obtaining the spiritual world in a pure form. The first stage is the fall of Babylon. The second stage is the fall of the Beast and his companion the False Prophet who spreads the teaching of the Beast. The third stage is the fall of the divine counter powers which are usually called Satan. Humanity will have to prepare itself and make itself strong enough in order to go through this threefold fall of the adversaries of the Christ impulse without endangering their soul development.

First comes what is called the Fall of Babylon. Here we can place the sum of all the errors which humanity can fall into through their human nature before our souls. Everything which tends to drag human beings down below the spiritual level is included in what St. John calls the Babylonian Temptation.

Babylon is the city in which a falling away from spirituality through passions held sway in an almost stereotyped way at a certain period in its mystery development, and everything which represents emotions in human life, which remain out of control on a smaller or larger scale is summarized by this city. Really deep mysteries existed in Babylon, or in the mystery centers of Babylon, in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the super-earthly cosmos and in which one could learn about starry secrets concerning the celestial worlds and their spiritual content. The earliest priests in ancient Babylon used human powers of clairvoyance and dreams in a way which we would call mediumistic today. A wonderful, ancient Babylonian teaching developed in this somewhat mediumistic way. Mediums become morally degenerate, and because there is a certain discrepancy between what they reveal and what they are, they can eventually no longer distinguish between truth and lies. Here one gets into a region where morality and immorality are no longer distinct.

Someone is a medium if his ego and astral body are pulled out of his physical and etheric bodies by an external force, and this was also what happened at the time of the Babylonian priests. However, another power sits in this ego and astral body as soon as they have been pulled out of the medium’s physical and etheric body. Depending on whether the initiate who brings this about has good or bad intentions and belongs to the left or the right, this can be a good power or an evil one. Excellent things came to light in this way in ancient Babylonian times, but the problem was with what occurred when the medium returned to his physical body. You see, one cannot get by in the spiritual world with the logic and discrimination between lies and truth which one has in the physical world. It is a complete error to think that one can use the concepts of lies and truth which one rightly uses in the physical world, in the spiritual world. There is nothing there which one could distinguish in such a way. Some of the beings there are good and others are evil. One has to know them through themselves, and in fact, they tell one the kind of being they are. Even the evil ones are truthful in their own way. We cannot apply anything which we have to use in the physical world to the spiritual world. Hence mediums become corrupted, and the corruption with respect to truth and lies then extends to other forms of corruption. Babylon went through this development from the greatest revelations of spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption; first with respect to the principle of spiritual revelation, and then also with respect to human life in general, so that the previous corruption in the spiritual sphere extended to the latter. This spiritual corruption is very powerful; so that someone becomes more immoral if he becomes corrupt after he has gone into spiritual realms than he did before with his ordinary human tendencies. This is why Babylon was considered to be a representative of moral corruption.

The expressions for corruption which we find here are ones which were in common use. The whole of humanity over the entire earth imitated the Babylonians and thereby became a kind of city of Babylon. The city of Babylon is to be found among mankind on earth; it exists wherever human beings have succumbed to the Babylonian Temptation. And if we investigate what is active in the Babylonian corruption, we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active in it everywhere. Ahriman is in our emotions, which thereby degenerate. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic principles are opposite poles. The Ahrimanic element is present in what falls here, as for instance when Babylon falls, and it is opposed to the Luciferic element.

The Fall of Babylon is all the errors humanity can fall into when they are also influenced by the initiation principle, it is human perversions. When Babylon falls, the remaining human aberrations will be eliminated from further world evolution. The beings who Fall with Babylon are men; it is human aberration. However, in the case of the Fall of the Beast and the False Prophet who supports the teaching of the Beast, what falls is something spiritual and superhuman, and not something human. Something which is outside of the human kingdom falls, namely, the Beast who breaks in upon human communities, and the one who proclaims the teaching of this Beast. Hence one is dealing with something which can take possession of human beings where something superhuman is working directly in men with an evil impulse, and it’s not a matter of a weak nature working, as in the case of a medium.

All those who will participate in the Fall of Babylon will have become degenerate through the fact that they tried to do things which their bodily organization could not stand; their organization became weak with respect to these things, and therefore they became corrupt. In the Fall of Babylon humanity’s organization acts out of weakness. In the Fall of the Beast and the False Prophet it’s not as if a medium became corrupt because he got weak, but it’s as if the spirit which overpowers the ego and astral body of the medium during hypnosis would then go into his physical and etheric body and make use of the physical body in order to wreak havoc on earth through the human being.

A time will come when we will see human beings walking around on earth who couldn’t stand what really lay in the Christian annunciation that took the Christ into their souls, but who didn’t get to the level of the Christ with their etheric and physical bodies, and therefore became corrupt and devoted to other spirits; but they didn’t devote themselves to them with full consciousness, so that they became corrupt. These are the first ones, who are included in the Fall of Babylon.

The other ones walk around like men, but their fate is that their human ego is not in them, so that one can no longer speak of them as human beings, for they are possessed by the Beast and the False Prophet. This will come after the fall of Babylon. There will be people walking around on earth who will be demons, for Ahrimanic powers will act in them directly.

Ahrimanic powers will intervene more and more and Ahrimanic spirits will also use human bodies for other things. A time will come when Christians will have to ask themselves seriously when they meet this or that human being: Is that really a human being or is it a very loose mantle for Ahrimanic spirits? This will be the second fall, and the Beast and his False Prophet will take possession of human bodies. Thereby these demons will have fallen. So first we have the fall of corrupt human beings and then the fall of certain corrupt spirits, who are close to men. These spirits take a tumble in the second fall.

Then we have the third fall, which is the Fall of Satan in the Apocalypse. Here we have a very high being who does a different kind of work than the one which can be done on earth. The Beast and the False Prophet are powers who lead mankind astray; they want to steer humans in the wrong direction in a moral and intellectual respect. However, the power which is meant in the Fall of Satan wants something quite different. It wants to throw the whole earth off its course, and not just mankind. Seen from a human, earthly standpoint, this power is a terrible adversary of the Godhead.

For the first stage, the Babylonian stage, will have straying human beings who have drawn an aberration into themselves through their physical constitution, so that there is no hope that anything particularly good will become of these walking human bodies over which the ego and astral body have entirely lost control. These bodies must be given up for lost although perhaps not the ego and astral body which belong to them. The former will then go on as such along the karmic paths of humanity. At a particular point in time, we see certain men walking around in their bodies, who are men who have succumbed to the Babylonian Temptation and whose bodies and what is in them fall out of evolution: the Fall of Babylon.

The second thing is that human beings will walk around — one will be able to see this — of whom one will have to say that Ahrimanic powers are living in them. Here Ahriman is acting directly; this is the Beast; the Fall of the Beast and of the False Prophet of the Beast, who is a superhuman being and not a man.

The third thing is that one will notice that something about the laws of nature is becoming unexplainable. This will be the greatest and most important experience that people will be able to have, when they notice that something is becoming unexplainable about natural laws and that phenomena are not taking place in accordance with the laws of nature.

Satan will make some first successful attempts to bring disorder into the planetary system. Humanity will have to develop a very strong spirituality in order to counteract this. For the disorder that can be brought about in this way will and can only be harmonized through the strong spirituality of human beings. For one will be able to speak of comets and one can already speak about them today to the effect that Satan is lying in wait for them in the cosmos, and that he wants to use their orbits to replace cosmos with chaos. It is really true that a real understanding of the Apocalypse leads deep down into the region where one has the greatest imaginable prospects of meeting John and then the Christ himself.”