In his autobiography, Franz
Hartmann wrote the following:
« I always had a peculiar liking for
the spirits of Nature, especially for the gnomes and the water nymphs. Some of my experiences with the gnomes I have
embodied in my book An Adventure among
the Rosicrucians, which was published at Boston, Mass., and some of those
with the gnomes were mentioned in another entitled Among the Gnomes of the Untersberg, published by T. Fisher Unwin
(London). Both of these books are now
out of print.
I am not a
“medium,” and my clairvoyant powers are very limited. Nevertheless I am quite convinced that these
spirits of Nature have a real existence, as real as ours, although the
conditions of their existence are difficult for us to understand. It seems that their element is the ether of
space, the etheric part of water and of the earth.
The gnomes
pass as easily through the most solid rocks as we move through air, but it
seems that they cannot pass through water, nor the nymphs through the
earth. The interior of mountains and
rocks is not dark for the gnomes; the sunlight comes to them just as the
Röntgen rays penetrate solid flesh. The
gnomes are mostly little, about two feet high; the nymphs and undines have
often very perfect human forms, but can change them at will. »
(Occult
Review, January 1908, p.34)
And later Franz Hartmann wrote an entire article about the spirits of
nature:
SOME REMARKS ABOUT THE SPIRITS OF NATURE
"All are but parts of one stupendous whole.
Whose body nature is and God the soul."
Pope.
If we begin to realize that the whole of nature is the embodiment of
soul, and that this soul becomes differentiated in various forms during the
process of evolution, in the same way as we see universal “matter”
differentiated in an endless variety of visible bodies, it will not be
difficult to grasp the idea, that besides the visible inhabitants of this world
there may be other kingdoms, invisible to our eyes, but nevertheless as “real”
to their inhabitants as this world is real to us, and that these kingdoms are
peopled with innumerable beings, each class and each individual having its own
character and qualities, be they good or bad or indifferent.
Lord Lytton says in his Zanoni:
« Life is one
all-pervading principle, and even the thing that seems to die and putrefy but
engenders new life and changes to new forms of matter. Reasoning then by
analogy — if not a leaf, if not a drop of water, but is no less than yonder
star, an inhabitable and breathing world — common sense would suffice to teach
that the circumfluent Infinite, which you call space — the boundless Impalpable
which divides the earth from the moon and the stars — is filled also with its
correspondent and appropriate life. »
And further on he says:
« In the drop of water
you see animalculae vary; how vast and terrible are some of these monster motes
as compared with others! Equally so with the inhabitants of the atmosphere.
Some of surpassing wisdom, some of horrible malignity, some hostile as fiends
to man, others gentle as messengers between Earth and Heaven. »
Such descriptions may perhaps be taken as the outcome of the imagination
of some writer of fiction; but there is a long array of accounts of
clairvoyants and scientific investigators in no way given to fiction, whose
experiences have proved to them that all the four elements — earth, water, air
and fire (ether) — are peopled with beings, possessed of organisms adapted to
their surroundings, and that these spirits of nature, under certain conditions,
may even become visible and enter into intercourse with man.
Theophrastus Paracelsus describes
these nature spirits as follows:
« There are beings who
live exclusively in only one element, while man exists in all four. Each of
these elements is visible and tangible to the beings dwelling therein. Thus the
Gnomes (the spirits of the earth) may know all that is going on in the interior
of the earthly shell of our planet; this shell being to them what air is to us;
the Undines (or water nymphs) thrive and breathe in their watery world; the
Sylphs live in the air like fishes in water; and the Salamanders are happy in
the element of fire (ether).
To each nature spirit the element
in which it lives is transparent, invisible and respirable, as the atmosphere
is to ourselves. They cannot properly be called “spirits,” because they have
astral bodies made up of (astral) flesh, blood and bones; but there is a great
difference between the substance composing their bodies and ours. They live and
propagate; they eat and talk, act and sleep; they occupy a place between men
and spirits, resembling men and women in their organization of form and being
like spirits in regard to the rapidity of their locomotion.
They have no higher principles,
and are therefore not immortal. Neither water nor fire can injure them, and
they cannot be locked up in 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
cunning, and are incapable of spiritual progress. »
(For more particulars, see F.
Hartmann, Paracelsus. London: Kegan Paul, 1896.)
THE GNOMES
Or “spirits of the earth,” are said to inhabit especially mountainous
regions, rocks and subterraneous caves. And here it may be remarked, that what
to us appears as solid rock may be to them a cave or even a palace; because
their world is the product of their imagination, as ours is the ultimate
product of our own will and thought, and if a sleeping man penetrates in his
astral body into the residence of the gnomes their dwellings will appear
perfectly natural to him, and on awakening he will perhaps fully believe that
he has been there in his physical form. The gnomes are like little men and
women, about one foot high; but they are able to change and elongate their
bodies, so as to appear like giants.
They build their own houses and strange-looking edifices; they can pass
like a thought through grossly material substances just as easily as we can
pass through the air. They have their leaders and authorities, their kings and
queens; they beget children and resemble mankind in many ways. They see the sun
and the sky the same as we, because each element is transparent to those who
live in it. They are on the whole kindly disposed towards man, but they have an
aversion against self-conceited and hypocritical persons or vulgar people of
any kind. They love peace and tranquility, and are often driven away from their
homes by the noisy industrial activity of mankind invading their realm.
(Note: Franz Hartmann gave some
anecdotes about the gnomes which you can read in the three articles below
this.)
THE UNDINES
The loveliest spirits of nature are undoubtedly the water-nymphs, or
undines; their habitation is the “element" of water, which means to say,
the ethereal part of it, of which visible water is its outward and visible
manifestation. The belief in water-nymphs is almost universal among
unsophisticated people living in solitary places near rivers or lakes, and it
is said that persons born between the days of November 20 and 24 are sometimes
endowed with the faculty of hearing their songs, it being the pleasure of these
spirits to dance upon the waves at the time of sunset or during moonlit nights,
and to enjoy themselves with singing, laughter and merriment.
Those people who have watched them during their frolics describe them as
being very beautiful and their voices as sounding like those of birds of
paradise. Some clever and sceptical scientists, being intent to discover the
source of this “vulgar superstition,” caught a dugong or halicore, and as this
fish sometimes emits a noise resembling the barking of a dog, they thought they
had explained the mystery; but the halicore is a fish and the undines are
water-spirits, whose voices resemble the noise made by a halicore no more than
the song of the nightingale resembles the bellowing of an ox.
Theophrastus Paracelsus says:
« As there are in our
world water and fire, visible bodies and invisible essences, likewise these
beings are varied in their constitution and have their own peculiarities and
conditions of existence, for which human beings have little comprehension.
Nevertheless, the two worlds, ours and theirs, intermingle and cast their
shadows upon each other and thus it happens that events taking place in the
invisible world may sometimes be seen in the visible one. As the fish lives in
water, so each spirit lives in its own element.
The element in which we breathe
and live is the air, but to the Undines the water is what the air is to us, and
if we are surprised that the water is their element, they may be surprised that
we breathe the air. The human and animal kingdoms are not the only ones on the
wide expanse of nature. The omnipotence of God is not limited to His taking
care only of those, but abundantly able to take care also of the spirits of
nature and of many other things, of which men know nothing. »
The nymphs and undines have human forms, and their ethereal residences
and palaces within the ethereal element of water. They live in communities, but
some may be found in isolated places in a secluded spot in some spring, or they
may be seen in the foam or spray of some cataract. They are on the whole kindly
disposed towards such human beings as are simpleminded and unsophisticated; but
they avoid and fly from the presence of conceited and opinionated persons,
inquisitive sceptics and quarrelsome or cantankerous men.
There are cases cited in which an undine has fallen in love with a man
and married him, and had children by him who grew up as human beings. They are
said to make very faithful wives; but they are also jealous, and woe to the
lover of an undine if he proves unfaithful to her. She will then not only return to her own
element, but revenge herself upon her betrayer.
The nymphs have no human souls and are, therefore, not able to attain
immortality; but they may become immortal by uniting themselves with man. For
this reason they seem to be instinctively attracted to man.
There is a story told about a nobleman, Count Stauffenberg, who was
married to a nymph.
One evening towards sunset the Count was returning from a hunting
excursion, and as he rode through the woods he heard a sweet voice singing very
beautifully; he stopped and listened. The song was not in any human language;
nevertheless, he understood its meaning, and it may be translated as follows:
"Oh, what is this secret longing
Welling up within my heart?
Unknown powers, surging, thronging,
Rending solid rocks apart.
New-born joys and dying sadness.
Bursting clouds and opening sight!
Something whispers full of gladness:
This is love, is life and light."
As the Count listened, a strange feeling arose within his manly breast,
which heretofore had been inaccessible to the promptings of love and affection;
he stopped, and after descending from his horse he crept nearer and looking
through the bushes he beheld a little lake and the songstress in the shape of a
beautiful maiden combing her long streaming hair, while her naked body seemed
to be clothed in a halo of glowing rose by the light of the setting sun.
Now, for the first time in his life the Count felt the power of love and
an exclamation of joy escaped his lips. The apparition vanished, but the Count,
being now deeply in love, went day after day to that solitary lake, hoping to
see the maiden again. His constancy was rewarded; for, after he had made many
fruitless attempts to meet her, she at last appeared to him in a nebulous
shape, which, however, grew denser and more visible every day, until at last
she stood before him, a glorious material body, solid enough to be grasped in
his embrace.
It does not take a long time for lovers to understand each other, and
the Count took her to his castle and made her his wife. There was a great
festival and all the guests admired the beauty and loveliness of the Countess Adalga
von Stauffenberg and the amiability of her ways.
Thus the pair lived together in happiness for several months; but
however constant and true the heart of woman may be, the heart of man often
proves fickle and craves for new experiences and sensations. Thus it happened
that the Count one day met a pretty peasant girl and fell in love with her. He
now began to neglect his wife and thought of means for getting rid of his
matrimonial obligations. Finally he consulted the parish priest and confided to
him that his wife was a water-nymph and not a human being.
The priest, who was a frequent guest at the castle, was only too willing
to accommodate the Count and to gratify his wishes; so he pretended to be
horrified and told him his wife was a devil, that no legal divorce was
necessary, but that he should simply pay a certain sum as a penance to the
Church and without hesitation drive the woman away. This the Count did and took
to himself the peasant girl; but on the morning after their wedding they were
both found strangled in their bed.
THE SYLPHS
The spirits of the air consist of several classes and are, as a whole,
not very communicative. There are giants among them and it is dangerous for
mankind to deal with them, especially when they are connected with the spirits
of fire; but there are also some of them kindly disposed towards man. The
spirits of the air are not all alike, which is to say that the god of the winds
manifests himself in different ways. We welcome him, when in the shape of a
refreshing breeze he affectionately caresses our cheeks on a hot summer day;
but we dislike his appearance when, surrounded by dark and threatening clouds,
he appears with thunder and lightning as the god of storms and destruction.
Every occultist knows, that behind every manifestation of power in
nature there is hidden a conscious origin and that even the powers of the air
may be propitiated by sacrifices or even subjugated by the power of the spirit,
provided we have that divine power at oar command. The Christ-spirit in us can
control the storms of passion when they arise in our mind, and the same spirit
may control the storms arising within the macrocosm if they arise within its
dominion. Therefore, it is claimed that saints and adepts have in times of old
given proofs of their power of controlling the elements, and the Secret
Doctrine teaches that high planetary spirits guide all the cosmic forces in
nature.
Another story is told about a certain gentleman who fell in love with a
young and beautiful girl. She was a
stranger and no one knew from whence she came or who were her parents.
Nevertheless, he married her and the only condition she made for her consent
was that he should never attempt to find out who she was; for she said:
« The very moment you
would find out who I am, I would have to part from you; you would lose me and
never see me again. »
Now this girl was a water-nymph, and it was a condition of her
existence, that on certain nights she should return to her native element. For
a long time she lived happily with her husband; but in the course of time he
became aware of her mysterious disappearances, and curious to know the secret
of them. One night he therefore pretended to sleep, but watched her with
half-closed eyes.
Seeing how she transformed herself and assumed her natural state, he
made a start of surprise, whereupon the lady, with a cry of despair,
disappeared and was never more seen.
THE SALAMANDERS
The elemental spirits of fire are a dangerous class. They are sometimes
the cause of otherwise unaccountable incendiarisms and conflagrations, as the
following instance may go to show:
During my stay in India in 1885 there occurred many apparently causeless
house-burnings at a village named Vallam in the Tanjore district. Almost every
year some of the thatched houses took fire spontaneously, while nothing of that
kind took place in the neighbouring villages, although the houses there were of
the same construction; and it is said that such fires broke out before the eyes
of observers and without any visible cause.
Sometimes while the fire was being put out in one place, it broke out in
some other part of the house. The inhabitants unanimously ascribed these
phenomena to the action of a fire-elemental named Avari Amman, to whom they
make sacrifices at certain times of the year, and which is said to inhabit a
little temple at the edge of the village. If these sacrifices are made
promptly, all goes on well; but if the elemental finds himself neglected he
takes his revenge by setting houses on fire.
These elementals seem sometimes to take possession of a mediumistic
person and combine and co-operate with his will. I knew a poor miner in
Colorado; he was a red-haired villain, a drunkard and beggar; but he seemed in
possession of certain occult powers, or rather obsessed by them, for he told me
that whenever it was his earnest desire that this or that house of the town
where we lived should burn, it invariably took fire.
He said that he had made several such experiments for the purpose of
gratifying his curiosity to see whether he had actually such a power, and they
invariably turned out to his own satisfaction. If we study the history of
witchcraft and modem spiritism, we find accounts of phenomena where some
apparition or ghost has grasped some object and left the brand-marks of its fingers
upon it.
Devas of the fire or fire-elementals may sometimes be the cause of
volcanic eruptions, a theory which does not exclude the known fact that such
things can be explained by known physical or chemical causes, because each
phenomenon requires certain conditions for its taking place. The cooking of a
dinner can be explained by the action of the fire upon the hearth; but the
presence of the cook should not be left out of consideration in investigating
the subject.
The salamanders five in the element of fire and enjoy them selves
therein. They may assume various forms.
They seem to be of a low kind of intelligence, but perhaps they are lovers of
musical sounds, because the flames of fire have been seen to rise and sink and
dance to the tune of some song or whistling done by a person endowed with
occult powers.
At the present time the city of Berlin seems to be visited by an
epidemic of incendiarism. Fires break out daily in lofts and garrets of houses
sometimes in several places at once, and the police has not yet been able to
discover the incendiaries. I do not claim that this mischief is done by
fire-elementals directly and without any human co-operation; but we might
suggest that the perpetrators are weak-minded persons, who may be made subject
to the influence of such elementals, without knowing it, and thus act
accordingly.
The spirits of nature have their dwellings within us as well as outside
of us, and no man is perfectly master over himself unless he thoroughly knows
his own nature and its inhabitants; for man is an exact image and counterpart
of the great outside world, in his own nature is contained his heaven and also
his hell.
CONCLUSION
With this discussion of the elemental spirits of nature, the subject
under consideration is by no means exhausted; for there remains a great number
of various classes of fairies and elves, hobgoblins and imps for our
consideration, a description of which would require the writing of an
encyclopedia, for the whole of the universe is a manifestation of life and
consciousness expressed in innumerable different forms.
There is nothing that lives without “soul” in the universe; because soul
itself is the life. Some of the most lovely apparitions are, as may be
imagined, the spirits of flowers, and I will, in concluding this article,
mention the experience of one of my friends. He writes:
« Last summer I had a
flower-pot in my bedroom with a most beautiful campanula. The stem was covered
with leaves and between them appeared the violet-coloured buds, emitting a
faint but very agreeable odour. One morning I awoke in a somewhat unusual
manner.
It seemed to me that I had been
awakened by something. It was still dawn and a strong odour coming from the
campanula pervaded the room; but it seemed as if this odour had become
separated from the plant, and were resting like a cloud in the vicinity of my
couch. The next morning the same thing happened again; but now that cloud had
become less nebulous and taken the shape of a most beautiful female form, enveloped
in a transparent violet veil.
The face of that angelic being
had an expression of indescribable loveliness and innocence, while she was
looking at me with her blue eyes full of spiritual light, affection and
tenderness. For a long time I regarded her, not daring to move, for fear that
any motion on my part might cause the apparition to disappear; but finally the
normal every-day consciousness took possession of me, and I fully awoke to the
supposed realities of external life.
For one moment more I beheld the
fairy. She disappeared, and with her the cloud of that sweet odour was
gone. Only the faint odour of the campanula
was now perceptible. It seemed to me that the ethereal form of that fairy had
withdrawn itself within the campanula, this being her material body. This
experience was repeated for several days afterwards. Each morning the
apparition grew stronger and I felt that a strong friendship existed between
myself and the fairy of that campanula, which I loved so much. For some reason the plant had to be taken to
another room, after which it soon withered and faded away. »
Everybody knows that sympathies exist between human beings and plants
and even minerals, and that those who love flowers seem to be loved by them and
that the flowers keep fresh, while they soon fade in the hands of another. Thus
it may be with all the elemental spirits of nature. Love binds all beings together, and if we
wish to get acquainted with these spirits of nature, we must approach them not
in a cold spirit of scientific investigation, mixed with suspicion and
scepticism, but with a simple receptive mind and a heart full of love.
(Occult Review, December 1911,
p.316-318, and January 1912, p.25-30. And you can download the facsimile here.)
No comments:
Post a Comment