Fourth Lecture

Even if we are clear about the fact that spiritual entities really did enter on the one hand as the Luciferic in such things as hatred, or as the Ahr in such things as speech or even thinking, on the other hand we must also realize how things are significant in the whole context of the world, how this enters into the whole context of the world. When I look at hatred in such a way that I say that the great initial facts rest on it, precisely that it can individualize itself, separate itself, that not everything floats together in a general primeval slime, then I am pointing to the phenomenon, to the fact of hatred in the distant past, in that past in which man did not yet exist in his present form; I am pointing to a very, very distant past. So, in a sense, I am giving you an insight into hatred that corresponds to a distant, distant past, the past in which man had not yet separated himself from the rest of the world. We can speak of the different kingdoms of nature, of which we know — you only have to read my 'Occult Science' — how they have developed as mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. We can speak of these nature kingdoms. If we speak of them completely, not in their illusory but in their reality, the power of hatred lives in all of this, but hatred as I have illustrated it to you as cosmic hatred.