THE FAIRY CREATURES EXPLAINED BY FRANZ HARTMANN

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.)