Fire-air

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Fire-air, sometimes called Akasha substance, formed on the Old Moon and is, according to the occult view, the primordial matter that underlies all material existence. As the sulphur or sulphur process, fire-air is one of the three fundamental processes of the alchemical Tria Principia.

The Fire-mist Atmosphere of the Old Moon and the Early Earth

The fire-air, permeated with watery substances, the fire-mist, later formed the atmosphere of the Old Moon:

„Out of the whole bottom grew the plant animals, and then above them moved those entities which were human animals, in the perimeter of the Moon which is called "fire-air." Think of the whole air filled with vapours of saltpetre, carbonic and sulphuric acid; in this fiery air, which you would thus get, lived the lunar men. The occultist always knew this fiery air; and under the old earth conditions there was even the possibility of chemically producing such fiery air, which today can only be done in very small circles. The knowledge of this has been preserved by genuine alchemy. Therefore, when you read in "Faust": I want to make a little fire-air..., this is an allusion to the depths of occultism. Air of fire enveloped the Moon, that was its atmosphere.“ (Lit.:GA 100, p. 118)

Fire breathing

At that time, man consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. What today is inner blood heat, man on the Old Moon had as respiratory heat. He had fire-breathing with which he absorbed the fire-mists of the Moon's atmosphere. Breathing and nutrition were not yet separate from each other. Man did not have a closed blood circulation at that time, but the fire-air currents were rhythmically alternating, sometimes with denser, sometimes with less dense blood-like substance. Sometimes these currents appeared like a cosmic umbilical cord stretching into the atmosphere and bringing the substances into the human body. It was the work of the Angels who infused these blood juices into the human being. In doing so, they completed their own human development and formed their I. As the blood streams entered the human being, the human being began to sound from within as an expression of the collective, not yet individual soul experience.

The Sons of the Fire-Mist

Even in the early evolution of the Earth, after the separation of the Sun, the fire-mists in which human beings began to incarnate still played an essential role. The descending human beings, the first leaders of humanity (Manus), were then called Sons of the Fire-Mist.

„This bodily-soul human being is incarnated in a much finer and lighter matter than the later human being. There is a continual condensation. That is why we speak of the so-called 'sons of the fire-mist'.“ (Lit.:GA 53, p. 229)

„Already the physicist tells you - and this as a hypothesis - that the further back we go in earth evolution, the higher and higher degrees of temperature we come to. Now the theosophist or the practical mystic really looks back into these primeval times, and he sees in what we call the Akasha chronicle these states as a truth, just as the average man sees table and chairs as a truth before him. We come to a state in which all the substances on our Earth are in quite different relations to each other than they are today.

You know that when substances are heated they change their state. Solid substances become liquid, liquid substances become vapour and so on. Now we come back to immeasurably higher degrees of temperature than we know on Earth today. At that time the whole material world of our Earth was different. Only those who are caught up in the materialistic conception and who are caught up in the immediate view of our Earth can come to the conclusion that this is impossible. He who frees himself from what is our reality today also realises that life was possible in these higher temperature states of this Earth. Man really did live in these higher states of temperature, but in a quite different way. He lived in a state of "fire mist". The bodies were a vapour-like, soft mass, a mass that cannot really be compared with what we know today.“ (Lit.:GA 53, p. 243f)

„For the Earth, the consequence of the Sun's emergence was a further material condensation. Solid matter was formed out of the liquid; likewise the light ether separated into another kind of light ether and into an ether which gives the bodies the ability to heat. Thus the Earth became a being that developed warmth within itself. All its beings came under the influence of warmth. Again, a similar process had to take place in the astral as before; some beings built themselves up higher at the expense of others. A part of the beings emerged that was suitable for working the coarse, solid materiality. And thus the solid skeleton of the mineral kingdom was created for the Earth. At first all the higher kingdoms of nature were not yet effective on this solid mineral bone mass. On Earth, therefore, we have a mineral kingdom that is hard, a plant kingdom that has water and air as its densest matter. In this kingdom, through the processes described, the air body itself had condensed into a water body. In addition, animals existed in the most diverse forms, those with water bodies and those with air bodies. The human body itself was subject to a process of condensation. It had condensed its densest corporeality to the point of wateriness. This water body was permeated by the warmth ether that had developed. This gave his body a materiality that could be called gaseous. This material state of the human body is described in works of secret science as that of the fire-mist. Man was embodied in this body of fire-mist.“ (Lit.:GA 11, p. 118)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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