38.15  Animal matter consists thus of life units that we call "meat life units". Such a life unit is indicated in the symbol by the round figure with the triangle and the ring-shaped coloured areas on the right of the symbol's lowest step. It thus constitutes a living microbeing from the animal kingdom of its spiral. The triangle indicates its I. The violet-coloured area around the triangle symbolises its superconsciousness. The three coloured sections around the superconsciousness constitute its organism. The green and yellow colours of the ring-shaped figures symbolise the life units that in reality are too highly evolved to be food for other beings without being killed and decomposed. The red ring, by contrast, symbolises the life unit whose physical organism is an aura of force, which is liberated during the process of digestion in the stomach of the carnivorous being and can incarnate in the macro-being's physical organism as life-renewing nourishment.
      As the symbol indicates, the meat life unit consists of life units that are not suitable as food for living beings. This substance in the meat life unit that is unsuitable as food is indicated by the yellow and green colour. The red section in the meat life unit thus indicates the life units that are more or less spiritual in nature and constitute the only real, true nutrition in animal food. But since this nutrition in the case of the beasts of prey is to be found only in the organisms of other animal beings, the beast of prey or the carnivorous being must kill these other animals in order, through the digestion of these organisms, to acquire the nutrition that the red life units constitute for this being. The yellow and green life units in this organism are too far advanced in evolution in the physical state and cannot therefore incarnate in the carnivore's organism as vital force and nutrition like the red life units, which in the main consist as yet only of spirit. The organisms of these life units become therefore merely waste products and leave as excrement, while their spirit goes on to a new rebirth in the organisms of higher kinds of physical beings.
      Thus we see here that the animal method of nutrition can be maintained only by murder and killing. The beasts of prey and the carnivorous human beings must thus kill the living beings in order to liberate and utilise as nutrition the red life units contained in the organisms of the animal beings. But since only the red life units indicated in the symbol avoid death by being digested as food in an organism, they are the only ones that can be nutrition for the carnivore's organism, while the highly evolved yellow and green life units cannot be nutrition. They are merely encasements from which the red life units have been liberated during the process of digestion. As previously mentioned, these encasements, that is the organisms of the yellow and the green life units, leave therefore as corpses and excrement. Here we see how imperfect a method of nutrition the animal diet is. The animal product contains thus, in the form of the red life units, merely a relatively poor form of nutrition. But in order that these can extricate themselves from their life built into meat, a mass of very highly evolved life units in the meat or in the other animal products must be killed in the organism of the carnivore. That it is no paradisiacal state for these life units, which thus means the yellow and the green, to be digested in the gastric acid of an organism and here be killed and decomposed, is a matter of course. But the beast of prey is thus reduced to this killing dietary method. It is created in order to live in this way. How could it otherwise sustain its life?
      On the lowest step in the symbol, which indicates the animal kingdom, we see animal nutrition symbolised. Furthest to the right on the same step we see an orange-coloured sun. The colour symbolises the zone of the killing principle. The fact that the figure is shaped like a sun symbolises that, even though the killing principle is vital to the divine plan of creation as regards transforming the living being into such a perfect being that it will constitute the human being in God's image after his likeness, in its most profound analysis it constitutes light.