22.6  The lower part of the symbol thus symbolises the unfinished human being surrounded by the physical world. We see in the symbol that it constitutes a section of the spiral cycle. Reading from the left we see the mineral kingdom, which consists of the effects of the kingdom of bliss on the physical plane. Next comes the plant kingdom and after that the animal kingdom. From the short rays in this kingdom to the yellow rays we find the unfinished terrestrial human beings. The two shortest rays symbolise the very primitive incipient human stages – stages that are closer to ape stages than human stages. These stages no longer exist on Earth. Beings from these stages have long since become extinct here but are to be found on other planets that are not as far advanced in evolution and the spiral cycle as the earth. The next ray symbolises the stage of our present primitive peoples, who will also soon be a thing of the past on the earth, since the beings of these stages are now well on their way to the next stages, which are populated by so-called civilised human beings. These stages are symbolised by the last-but-one ray before the yellow rays. As we know, the beings at the previous stages were guided by their religious instinct, which gave them an inkling of higher spiritual realities behind the physical world, which, with the help of world redemption, were couched in symbols and parables for these still very primitive or unfinished human beings so that they could understand and recognise them as the vital foundation of the morality and conduct of their temporary step in evolution. With the development of their faculty of intelligence, their faculty for religious belief degenerated. So these beings, as we have mentioned above, became materialists and atheists, and with this lost every spiritual foundation for morality and conduct. Since they could not as yet sense spiritually or cosmically, the physical world became their only sensory object. So arose materialistic science, which enabled people to control millions of horsepower from Nature's immense ocean of forces. They became geniuses in creating with physical matter. They became able to create a multitude of material things. And it is this that has led to the beings here being termed civilised human beings.
      But since the feelings of these beings are very lacking in neighbourly love, and they have therefore no particularly well developed intuition either, they cannot sense spiritually. And since the religious faculty to sense vaguely has also degenerated, the consciousness of these beings contains no knowledge whatsoever beyond their knowledge of physical matter. They therefore believe that superior power and the best weapons of war, indeed the ability to wipe out one's fellow human beings entirely, or, to be more explicit, one's enemies, is the all-outshining foundation for the creation of peace. The basis of their lives has therefore become an all-embracing expansion of their ability to mutilate, destroy and wipe out living beings. Since war cannot be abolished by war, and since one receives the evil that one does towards others as one's own fate, it is not so remarkable that the civilised terrestrial human stages have become the domicile of Armageddon or hell, the culmination of darkness. It is true that there are cathedrals, churches and temples all over the earth, from which humaneness and love are preached, but this preaching is designed only for people's ability to believe. It provides no material for the intelligence. And since people's ability to believe is dying out all over the world, the star of the religions based on belief will fade too in order finally to die out on the earth. This will make way for the emerging, rapidly developing intelligence, the initiation into materialism and atheism to which it gives rise, and the ensuing culmination of darkness in a devil-human form exemplifying what the Bible terms the "Serpent", the "Devil" or "Satan". In reality these terms do not express a particular existing superterrestrial being, but are on the contrary exclusively expressions for the terrestrial human being at its peak of darkness. From this peak of darkness people's most devilish machines of hell, totally destructive atomic or nuclear weapons and other mutilating and killing processes of hell are directed.
      Before continuing our explanation of symbol no. 22 we will here insert the explanation of symbol no. 22A, which is drawn merely as an auxiliary symbol to show the materialistic and atheistic area of the world picture or the universe.