Ninth Lecture

But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past.