132 9 The Secret L$e of Nature
astral body to the point when it will be under the control of "his im-
mortal self, the real I."
What helps a person in the continuing struggle to regain the state
of grace enjoyed before the Fall is, according to Peter Lamborn Wilson,
the constant intercession of a personal angel, who guards, cherishes,
protects, visits, and defends its ward.'
It is the personal angel who guards human memory, "awakening
recollections of the soul's previous earthly lives, in order to establish
continuity of endeavor-of the quest and aspiration of the soul from
life to lifeso that particular lives are not merely isolated episodes but
constitute the stages of a single path towards one sole end."
But angelic support does not mean substituting the angel's will for
human will.The guardian angel is programmed never to interfere with
human free will. "He is the clairvoyant helping the non-clairvoyant
with respect to psychic and physical temptations and dangers."
The angel is also seen as screening his proti.g-6 from the wrath of
heaven, acting as an advocate for a person, defending him or her like a
mother defends her child, without regard to whether he or she be
good or bad. This, says Wilson, is why traditional art presents guardian
angels as winged females and why the Virgin Mother bears the title
Regina angelorum. "Think of your angel as a luminous cloud of mater-
nal love above you, moved by the sole desire to serve you and to be
useful to you."
While to Swedenborg, Blake, and Goethe the world of angels was
as real as any, by the turn of the century Steiner was describing this
spiritual world from his own clairvoyant point of view, its beings as real
to him as humans. His object was to show how the threshold from the
physical to the supersensible can be crossed in order to comniuilicate
first with the elemental beings and then with the hierarchies in their
ascending ranks and functions throughout the cosmos.
- In biblical tradition, the period before the influence of Luciferic beings is de-
scribed as the Age of Paradise.To Steiner, the Fall, or expulsion from Paradise, was
conditioned by the descent of human beings out of this extraterrestrial region to the
earth, followed by their entanglement in the world of the senses.