the fact that there is a world, invisible to ordinary powers of vision,
existing in close juxtaposition to the world cognized by our material
senses. This world, or condition of existence for more ethereal beings,
has been variously called Spirit-world, Summer-land, Astral-world,
Hades, Kama-loca, or Desire-world, etc. Slowly and with difficulty do
ideas upon the nature and characteristics of this world dawn upon the
modern mind. The imagination, swayed by pictures of sensuous life,
revels in the fantastic imagery it attributes to this unknown and dimly
conceived state of existence, more often picturing what is false than
what is true. Generally speaking, the most crude conceptions are
entertained; these embrace but two conditions of life, the embodied and
disembodied, for which there are only the earth and heaven, or hell,
with that intermediate state accepted by Roman Catholics, called
purgatory. There is, therefore, for such minds, only two orders of
beings, _i.e._, mankind, and angels or devils, categorically termed
_spirits_; but what would be the mode of life of those spirits, is a
subject upon which ordinary intellects can throw no light at all. Their
ideas are walled in by an impenetrable darkness, and not a ray of light
glimmers across the unfathomable gulf lying beyond the grave; that
portal of death which, for them, opens upon unknown darkness, and closes
upon the light, vivacity, and gaiety of the earth.
The idea that the beings we would term _disembodied_ do actually inhabit
bodies of an aerial substance, invisible to our grosser senses, in a
world exactly suited to their needs, surpasses the comprehension of an
ordinary understanding, which can conceive only of gross matter, visible
and tangible. Yet science begins to talk of _mind-stuff_, or
_soul-substance_, in reality that ethereal substance which ranks next to
dense matter, and which it wears as an external, more hardened shell.
For there is space within space. Once realizing the existence of an
_inner world_, we shall find that all our ideas concerning space, time,
and every particular of our existence, and the world we live in must
become entirely revolutionized.
The principal source of knowledge which has been opened in modern times
concerning the next state of existence has revealed itself in a manner
homogeneous to itself. It has come by an interior method--a revelation
from within acting upon the without. The inner world, although always
acting upon and through its external covering, in a hidden or veiled
way, as from an inscrutable cause, has manifested itself in a manner
more overt and cognizable by the bodily senses of man. At least that
which has usually been termed, with more or less awe, the
_supernatural_, the _ghostly_, has impinged upon the mental incrassation
of sensual man as a thing to be reckoned with in daily life; no longer
to be relegated to the region of vague darkness _d'outre tombe_. Hence
the human mind is being awakened to study and dive into the depths of
that life within life, wherein dwell the disembodied, the so-called
_dead_, the angels, and, _per contra_, the devils. Those hidden aerial
and ethereal regions, wherein the _souls_ of things, and beings, draw
life from the bosom of nature; wherein they find their _active_ habitat;
wherein nature keeps a store of objects more wonderful, and infinitely
more varied, than serve for her regions of dense matter; wherein man can
discern the occult causes and beginnings of all things, even of his own
thoughts; and whereupon he learns, at length, that he possesses the
power of projecting by thought-creation forms more or less endued with
life and intelligence, which compose his mental world, and with which
he, as it were, "peoples space." He finds the sphere of his
responsibilities immensely enlarged by this new knowledge, of which he
is taking the first honeyed sips, delighted with the self-importance
which the heretofore unsuspected power of diving into the unseen seems
to bestow. If hitherto he has had to hold himself responsible for the
consequences of his external actions, that they should not militate
against the order of society as regards the laws of morality and virtue,
he has at least acted upon the impression that his _secret thoughts_
were his own, and remained with him, affecting no one but himself; were
incognizable in their veiled chambers, and of which it was not necessary
to take any notice; the transitory, evanescent, spontaneous workings of
mind, unknown and inscrutable, which begin and end like the flight of a
bird, whence coming and where going it is impossible to know.
By the first faint gleams of the light of hidden wisdom, which are
beginning to dawn upon his mind, he now perceives that responsibility
does not end upon the plane of earth, but extends into the aerial
regions of that inner world where his thoughts are no longer secret, and
where they affect the astral currents, acting for the good or detriment
of others to almost infinite extent; that he may act upon the ambient
atmospheres, not only of the outer but inner planes of life, like a
plant of poisonous exhalations, if his thoughts be not pure and good;
peopling _unseen_ space with the outcome of a debased mind, in the shape
of hideous and maleficent creatures. He becomes responsible, therefore,
for the consequences of his mental actions and thought-life, as well as
those actions carefully prepared to pass unchallenged before this
world's gaze.
Diving into the unseen by the light of the new spiritual knowledge now
radiating into all minds, we learn that there are three degrees of life
in man, the material, the aerial, and the ethereal, corresponding to
body, soul, and spirit; and that there are three corresponding planes of
existence inhabited by beings suited to them.
The subject of our paper will limit us at present to the aerial, or
soul-plane--the next contiguous, or astral world. The beings that more
especially live in this realm of the soul, have by common consent been
termed _elementals_. Nature in illimitable space teems with life in
forms ethereal, evanescent as thought itself, or more objectively
condensed and solidified, according to the inherent attraction which
holds them together; enduring according to the force, energy, or power
which gave them birth; intelligent, or non-intelligent, from the same
source, which is mental. These spirits of the soul-world are possessed
of aerial bodies, and their world has its own firmament, its own
atmosphere and conditions of existence, its own objects, scenes,
habitations. Yet their world and the world of man intermingle,
interpenetrate, and "throw their shadows upon each other," says
Paracelsus. Again, he says: "As there are in our world water and fire,
harmonies and contrasts, visible bodies and invisible essences, likewise
these beings are varied in their constitution, and have their own
peculiarities, for which human beings have no comprehension."
Matter, as known to men in bodies, is seen and felt by means of the
physical senses; but to beings not provided with such senses, the things
of our world are as invisible and intangible as things of more ethereal
substance are to our grosser senses. Elementals which find their habitat
in the interior of the earth's shell, usually called _gnomes_, are not
conscious of the density of the element of earth as we perceive it; but
breathe in a free atmosphere, and behold objects of which we cannot form
the remotest conception. In like manner exist the _undines_ in water,
_sylphs_ in air, and _salamanders_ in fire. The elementals of the air,
sylphs, are said to be friendly towards man; those of the water,
undines, are malicious. The salamanders can, but rarely do, associate
with man, "on account of the fiery nature of the element they inhabit."
The pigmies (gnomes) are friendly; but as they are the guardians of
treasure they usually oppose the approach of man, baffling by many
mysterious arts the selfish greed of seekers for buried wealth. We,
however, read of their alluring miners either by stroke of pick, or
hammer, or by floating lights to the best mineral "leads." Paracelsus
says of these subterranean elementals that they build houses, vaults,
and strange-looking edifices of certain immaterial substances unknown to
us. "They have some kind of alabaster, marble, cement, etc., but these
substances are as different from ours as the web of a spider is
different from our linen."
These inhabitants of the elements, or "nature-spirits," may, or may not
be, conscious of the existence of man; oftentimes feeling him merely as
a force which propels, or arrests them; for by his will and by his
thought, he acts upon the astral currents of the aerial world in which
they live; and by the use of his hands he sways the material elements of
earth, fire, and water wherein they are established. They perceive the
soul-essence of man with its "currents and forms," and they also are
capable of reading such thoughts as do not spiritually transcend their
powers of discernment. They perceive the states of feeling and emotions
of men by the "_colors_ and impressions produced in their auras," and
may thus irresistibly be drawn into overt action upon man's plane of
life. They are the invisible _stone-throwers_ we hear of so frequently,
supposed to be _human_ spirits; the perpetrators of mischief, such as
destruction of property in the habitations of men, noises, and
mysterious nocturnal annoyances.
Of all writers upon occult subjects to whose works we have as yet gained
access, Paracelsus throws the greatest light upon these tricky sprites
celebrated in the realm of poesy, and inhabiting that disputed land
popularly termed fairydom. From open vision, and that wonderful insight
of the master or adept into the secrets of nature, Paracelsus is able to
give us the most positive information concerning their bodily formation,
the nature of their existence, and other extraordinary particulars,
which proves that he has actually seen and observed them, and doubtless
also employed them as the obedient servants of his purified will; a
power into which the spiritual man ascends by a species of right, when
he has thrown off, or conquered, the thraldom of matter in his own body,
and stands open-eyed at "the portals of his deep within."
We will quote certain extracts from the pages of this wonderful
interpreter of nature. "There are two kinds of flesh. One that comes
from Adam, and another that does not come from Adam. The former is gross
material, visible and tangible for us; the other one is not tangible and
not made from earth. If a man who is a descendant from Adam wants to
pass through a wall, he will have first to make a hole through it; but a
being who is not descended from Adam needs no hole nor door, but may
pass through matter that appears solid to us without causing any damage
to it. The beings not descended from Adam, as well as those descended
from him, are organized and have substantial bodies; but there is as
much difference between the substance composing their bodies as there is
between matter and spirit. Yet the elementals are not spirits, because
they have flesh, blood, and bones; they live and propagate offspring;
they eat and talk, act and sleep, etc., and consequently they cannot be
properly called spirits. They are beings occupying a place between man
and spirits, resembling men and women in their organization and form,
and resembling spirits in the rapidity of their locomotion. They are
intermediary beings or composita, formed out of two parts joined into
one; just as two colors mixed together will appear as one color,
resembling neither one nor the other of the two original ones. The
elementals have no higher principles; they are therefore not immortal,
and when they die they perish like animals. Neither water nor fire can
injure them, and they cannot be locked up in our material prisons. They
are, however, subject to diseases. Their costumes, actions, forms, ways
of speaking, etc., are not very unlike those of human beings; but there
are a great many varieties. They have only animal intellects, and are
incapable of spiritual development."
In saying the elementals have "no higher principles," and "When they die
they perish like animals," Paracelsus does not stop to explain that the
higher principles in them are absolutely latent, as in plants; and that
animals in "perishing" are not destroyed, but the psychical or soul-part
of the animal passes, by the processes of evolution, into higher forms.
"Each species moves only in the element to which it belongs, and neither
of them can go out of its appropriate element, which is to them as the
air is to us, or the water to fishes; and none of them can live in the
element belonging to another class. To each elemental being the element
in which it lives is transparent, invisible, and respirable, as the
atmosphere is to ourselves."
"As far as the personalities of the elementals are concerned, it may be
said that those belonging to the element of water resemble human beings
of either sex; those of the air are greater and stronger; the
salamanders are long, lean, and dry; the pigmies (gnomes) are the length
of about two spans, but they may extend or elongate their forms until
they appear like giants.
"Nymphs (undines, or naiads) have their residences and palaces in the
element of water; sylphs and salamanders have no fixed dwellings.
Salamanders have been seen in the shape of fiery balls, or tongues of
fire running over the fields or appearing in houses;" or at psychical
seances as starry lights, darting and dancing about.
"There are certain localities where large numbers of elementals live
together, and it has occurred that a man has been admitted into their
communities and lived with them for a while, and that they have become
visible and tangible to him."
Poets, in their moments of exaltation, have an unconscious soul-vision
before which nature's invisible worlds lie like an open volume, and they
translate her secrets into language of mystic meanings whose harmonies
are re-interpreted by sympathetic minds. The poet Hogg, in his _Rapture
of Kilmeny_, would seem to have had a vision of some such visit as that
described above, into the fairyland of pure, peaceful _elementals_.
"Bonny Kilmeny gaed up the glen"--and is represented as having fallen
asleep. During this sleep she is transported to "a far countrye," whose
gentle, lovely inhabitants receive her with delight. The following
lines reveal the poet's power of inner vision, as will be seen by the
words italicized. They are in wonderful accord with the descriptions
given by Paracelsus from the actual observation of a _conscious seer_:
"They lifted Kilmeny, they led her away,
And she walk'd _in the light of a sunless day_;
The sky was _a dome of crystal bright_,
The _fountain of vision and fountain of light_;
The emerald fields _were of dazzling glow_,
And the _flowers of everlasting blow_."
It needs but a brushing away of the films of flesh, which occurs in
moments of rapt inspiration, for the soul, escaping from its
prison-house, to revel in the innocent, peaceful scenes of its own inner
world, and give a true description of what it beholds. The inner
meanings of things, the symbolical correspondences are revealed in a
flash of light, and the poet-soul becomes revelator and prophet all in
one. He sets it down to imagination and fancy, when he returns into his
normal state, and it is what we call "a flight of genius"--the power of
the soul to enter its own appropriate world. Certainly _les ames de
boue_ have no such power. It is, however, a _proof that world exists_,
if we will but understand it aright.
There has never existed a poet with a truer conception of "elemental"
life than Shakespeare. What more exquisite creation of the poet's fancy,
which _might be every word of it true_, for in no particular does it
surpass the truth, than that of _Ariel_, whom the "foul witch Sycorax,"
"by help of her more potent ministers, and in her most unmitigable
rage," did confine "into a cloven pine;" for Ariel, the good elemental,
was "a spirit too delicate to act her earthly and abhorred commands."
When Prospero, the Adept and White Magician, arrived upon the scene, by
his superior art he liberated the delicate Ariel, who afterwards becomes
his ministering servant for _good_, not for evil.
In the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, Titania transports a human child into
her elemental world, where she keeps him with so jealous a love as to
refuse to yield him even to her "fairy lord," as Puck calls him. Puck
himself is almost as exquisite a realization of elemental life as Ariel.
As Shakespeare unfolds the lovely, innocent tale of the occupations,
sports and pranks of this aerial people, he introduces us to the
elementals of his own beautiful thought world; and, although indulging
in the "sports of fancy," there is so broad a foundation of truth, that,
being enlightened by the revelations of Paracelsus, we no longer think
we are merely entertained by the poetical inventions of a master of his
art, but may well believe we have been witnesses of a charming reality
beheld through the "rift in the veil" of the poet's unconscious inner
sight. Indeed, one of the tenets of occult science is that there is
nothing on earth, nor that the mind of man can conceive, which is not
already existent in the unseen world.
We reflect in the translucence, or _diaphane_ of our mental world those
concrete images of things which we attract by the irresistible magnetism
of _desire_ working through the thought. It is a spontaneous,
unconscious mental process with us; but there is no reason why it should
not become a perfectly conscious process regulated by a divine wisdom
to functions of harmony with nature's laws, and to productions of beauty
and beneficence for the good of the whole world. As the world is the
concreted emanation of divine thought, so it is by thought that man, the
microcosm, _creates_ upon his petty, finite plane. Given the
desire--even if it be only as the lightest breath of a summer zephyr
upon the sleeping bosom of the ocean, scarcely ruffling its surface--it
becomes a center of attraction for suitable molecules of
thought-substance floating in space, which immediately "agglomerate
round the idea proceeding to reveal itself," _by means_ of clothing
itself in substance. By these silent processes in the invisible world
wherein our souls draw the breath of life, we form our mental world, our
personal character, even our very physical bodies. The _perisprit_, or
astral body, the vehicle for _formless spirit_, is essentially builded
up from the mental life, and grows by the accretion of those atoms or
molecules of thought-substance which are assimilable by the mind. Hence
a good man, a man of lofty aspirations, forms, as the _nearest_ external
clothing of his inner spirit, a beautiful soul-body, which irradiates
through and beautifies the physical body. The man of low and groveling
mind will, on the contrary, attract the depraved and poisoned substances
of the lower astral world; the malarial emanations thrown off by other
equally depraved beings, by which his mind becomes embruted, his soul
diseased, whilst his physical form presents in a concrete image the
ugliness of his inner nature. Such a man never ascends above the dense,
mephitic vapors of the sin-laden world, nor takes into his soul the
slightest breath of pure, vitalizing air. He is diseased by invisible
astral _microbes_, being most effectually self-inoculated with them by
the operation of desires which never transcend the earth. Did we lift
the veil which shrouds from mortal sight the elemental world of such a
moral pervert, we should behold a world teeming with hideous forms, and
as actively working as the _bacteria_ of fermentation revealed by a
powerful microscope, elementals of destruction, death, and decay, which
must pass out into other forms for the purification of the spiritual
atmosphere; creatures produced by the man's own thoughts, living upon
and in him, and reflecting, like mirrors, his hideousness back again to
himself. It is from the presence of innumerable foci of evil of this
kind that the world is befouled, and the moral atmosphere of our planet
tainted. They emit poisoned astral currents, from which none are safe
but those who are in the _positive_ condition of perfect moral health.
From the fountain of life we draw in the materials of life, and become,
upon our lower plane, other living fountains, which from liberty of
choice, and freedom of will, have the power of so muddying the pure
stream, that in its turbidness and foulness it becomes death
instead of life, and produces hell instead of heaven. When we, by
self-purification, and that constant mental discipline which trains us
upwards, clinging to our highest ideal by the tendrils of faith, and
love, and continual aspiration, as the vine would cling to a rock--have
eliminated all that is impure in our thought world, we become fountains
of life, and make our own heavens, wherein are reflected only images of
divine beauty. The whole elemental world on our immediate astral plane
becomes gradually transformed during the progress of our evolution into
the higher spiritual grades of being. And as humanity _en masse_
advances, throwing off the moral and spiritual deformity of the selfish,
ignorant ego, the astral atmospheres belonging to our planet world
become filled with elementals of a peaceful, loving character, of
beautiful forms, and of beneficent influences. The currents of evil
force which now act with a continually jarring effect upon those
striving to maintain the equilibrium of harmony with nature upon the
side of _good_, would cease. That depression, agitation, and distress
which now, from inscrutable causes, assail minds otherwise rejoicing in
an innocent happiness, forewarning them of some impending calamity, or
of some evil presence it seems impossible to shake off, would become
unknown. The horrible demons of war, with which humanity, in its sinful
state of _separateness_, is continually threatening itself--as if the
members of one body were self-opposed, and revolting from that state of
agreement that can alone ensure the well-being of the whole--would no
longer be held, like ravenous bloodhounds chafing against their leashes,
ready to spring, at a word, upon their hellish work; but they will have
passed away, like other hideous deformities of evil; and the serene
astral atmospheres would no longer reflect ideas of cruel wrongs to
fellow-beings, revenge, lust of power, injustice, and ruthless hatred.
We are taught that around an "idea" agglomerate the suitable molecules
of soul-substance--"Monads," as Leibnitz terms them, until a concrete
form stands created, the production of a mind, or minds. All the hideous
man-created beings, powers or forces, which now act like ravaging
pestilences and storms in the astral atmospheres of our planet will
have disappeared like the monstrous phantoms of a frightful dream, when
the whole of humanity has progressed into a state of higher spiritual
evolution. It is well to reflect that _each individual_, however humble
and apparently insignificant his position in the great human family, can
aid by his life, by the silent emanation of his pure and wise thoughts,
as well as by his active labors for humanity, in bringing nearer this
halcyon period of peace, harmony, and purity--that millennium, in short,
we are all looking forward to, as a dream we can never hope to see
realized.
In _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_, we read: "Violence was the
most baneful manifestation of man's spiritual decadence, and it
rebounded upon him from the elemental beings, whom it was his duty to
develop"--those _sub-mundanes_, towards whom man is now learning that he
incurs _responsibilities_ of which he is at present utterly unconscious,
but of which he will indubitably become more and more aware as he
ascends the ladder of spiritual evolution.