"Ahriman skillfully prepares his goal beforehand ... His incarnation is undoubtedly coming, and this lack of insight will enable him to prepare it triumphantly." RS

Ready for Ahriman? Awaken to conscious thinking with the study and practice of the Philosophy of Freedom.

The Advent of Ahriman By Robert Mason
Ahriman in Modern Times
The modern scientific revolution, since the fifteenth century, has been inspired largely by Ahriman. He is the inspirer of amoral, atheistic, mechanistic materialism, and the kind of cleverness that goes with it. The regular Gods' intent for the present age (also called the "Consciousness Soul Epoch") is that mankind should develop increased consciousness, together with the individuality and spiritual freedom that go with that consciousness.

Ahriman opposes this; he wants Man to live from unconscious instincts as an unindividualized, impulsive animal -- clever, but an animal nonetheless.  The modern mind has almost no conception of the true nature of conscious thinking. Steiner, especially in his book The Philosophy of Freedom, has been our teacher of real thinking, but the general intellectual culture has not learned the lesson. The fact is that the normal "scientific" thinking in this age, no matter how clever, is hardly conscious at all (possibly with some relatively rare exceptions at moments of "insight" or mathematical discovery).

In the kind of consciousness usual in our "scientific" culture, we become conscious only of the fixed results of the thinking, after it has been accomplished; we are not (usually) conscious of the thinking-process itself. And since it is unconscious, it is not our free action; it is automatic. When we think in the manner usual in our epoch, we are sentient automata, acting from instinct. And this is what Ahriman wants: he wants to stamp out all traces and all possibility of free, individualized human consciousness; he wants Man not to be an individual, but only a member of a general species of pseudo-mankind -- to be a clever, earth-bound animal, an "homunculus".

As indicated, Ahriman is the inspirer of the most extreme kind of "scientific" materialism: the doctrine that there is no spirit or soul in the world; that life itself is not in fact alive, but is only a complex of mechanical processes; that reality is at base only quantitative, that there is no reality in the qualitative -- color, sound, etc.; even that the human's inner being is a confluence of material forces. On the emotional level, he works in the human subconscious instincts, inspiring fear, hatred, lust for power, and destructive sex impulses. On the mental level, he inspires rigid, automatic thinking: (in Steiner's phrase) thinking almost entirely without thoughts.