Elementary being

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Rudolf Steiner: Elementary Beings, pastel on transparent paper (1923)

'Elementary beings (also elementals, elemental beings, elementary spirits, elemental spirits, nature spirits; German: Elementarwesen) are the work masters who are directly active in nature. To call them "elementary spirits" is actually misleading, because they have no "I", no independent spiritual core, but are serving members of the higher spiritual hierarchies. The Spirits of Rotation of Time guide their actions. Elementary beings come into being as cut-offs of higher spiritual beings, which belong to the third hierarchy (Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi). Man, as the fourth hierarchy, also unconsciously brings forth many different elementary beings through his activity. In accordance with their dependent character, they must never be attributed any moral responsibility for their actions. The elementary beings remain hidden from the physical senses, they only reveal themselves to the imaginative perception.

Properties of the elementary beings

„You do not need to imagine the elementary beings as being particularly highly developed; they do not go through birth and death like human beings. Very few of them have gone through anything even resembling human development. Most of them do not have such developments ahead of them. Some come - like comets - from other planets, disappear again and continue their existence elsewhere. What these entities accomplish is not without influence on human beings. Many things happen in the human astral body that are due to the effects of these beings. Only to him who can see in the astral space are such processes, which can take place in the human astral body, explicable.“ (Lit.:GA 88, p. 74)

Among elementary beings, the principle of form dominates over life and consciousness:

„The elementary spirits are such beings in whom form is more powerful than life and consciousness, whose form must therefore be dominated by consciousness and life. They are the exact opposite of the dhyanic beings. These can control more than their form and life. With the elementary spirits, form is more comprehensive than life and consciousness. They therefore demand other life and other consciousness to master their form. That is to say, the elementary spirit has to establish itself in other life and other consciousness in order to use it for itself. Therefore, it is the retardant that holds back other life and consciousness. Thus the elementary spirits are the actual restraining beings of evolution. All parasitic beings are dominated by such elementary spirits. They are those entities for us human beings which in the lunar epoch were already perfected in their kind, hence the form prevalent in them. They are now flooding away, they are in descending development.

Animals, for example, which carry a skeleton on the outside, which are wrapped in their skeleton, have pushed beyond development. Their inner development has dissolved, and from the outside they surround themselves with a horny layer (beetles, notch beasts). They are preparing themselves for the descent into the eighth sphere. The Old Moon also had an eighth sphere, a secondary Moon. These beings have finished then, they have gone beyond their development and are now like an overripe fruit. In the eighth sphere belong, for example, the spiders, and among the plants the mistletoe. Goethe therefore attributes the realm of spiders and flies to Mephisto. Everything parasitic is an outward expression of the elementary beings living on the astral plane.

Before that, man himself was an elementary being. Not everything physical in man is destined to be redeemed. A cinder remains from the human being. This dross that remains is constantly present in man, therefore he is under the influence of the astral elementary beings; the corresponding elementary being clings to him. Man is therefore in constant contact with that which is an impeding enemy, a disturber of his development. In German mythology, the beings that attach themselves to the human being are called the "albs" or elves. They appear in an undefined form in the so-called nightmare. These dreams manifest themselves in such a way that one believes a being is sitting on one's chest. When one becomes astrally sighted, one first sees these beings (The Dweller on the Threshold in Bulwer's "Zanoni"). It is the reflection of man's astral acquaintance with his alb, a man's fighting back against his enemy. The being is the projection of an astral being in ourselves. It is the [little] Guardian of the Threshold. The man who cannot overcome the fear of the inner enemy usually turns back at the gate of initiation.

In the higher realm of the astral plan, it is [the image of] the Sphinx, who must be thrown into the abyss before one can progress. The human being who has to develop is approaching this moment. But not every human being has to go through this stage of development in the same way. It is possible that he will be led through it as if blindfolded. By developing our moral nature we can overcome. If one can bring one's moral nature higher before one sees in the astral world, the appearance of the Guardian of the Threshold becomes less frightening.

In the Atlantean race it is chiefly the Turanians who have given themselves up to black magic and have become acquainted with the elementary world in the most extensive degree.“ (Lit.:GA 89, p. 133ff)

The elementary beings are inaccessible to sensual observation:

„But those who have spiritual powers of perception perceive such beings and can describe them. To the lower kinds of such beings belongs everything that the perceivers of the spiritual world describe as salamanders, sylphs, undines, gnomes. It need not be said that such descriptions cannot be regarded as images of the reality on which they are based. If they were, the world they refer to would not be a spiritual but a grossly sensual one. They are illustrations of a spiritual reality that can only be represented in this way, through parables. It is quite understandable that those who only want to accept sensual perception regard such beings as the spawn of a wild imagination and superstition. Of course, they can never become visible to sensual eyes, because they have no sensual body. Superstition does not lie in the fact that one regards such beings as real, but that one believes they appear in a sensuous way.“ (Lit.:GA 9, p. 156)

However, Rudolf Steiner also gives the hint that these elementary beings are in the process of development, through which they will later also become perceptible to the senses:

„If we look at the normal elementary kingdoms, that is - if we use the popular expression - the kingdoms of the gnomes, sylphs, undines, salamanders, we actually have in them kingdoms that still want to become something in the world. They are approaching similar forms which we have in our world of the senses, only they will be different, but they will one day become perceptible to such senses as men have today...“ (Lit.:GA 219, p. 84f)

On the other hand, there are elementary beings of a different kind, which already led a sensually tangible existence on the Old Moon, but are now in a descending evolution and can only be experienced supersensually. Paradoxically, they accompany man as gnome-like spirit dolts, as ugly spider beings related to the sylphs and undines, and as salamander-like warmth beings wherever he is enthusiastic about the true, the beautiful and the good. They are deeply despised by the regular elementary beings in nature and take refuge from them deep inside man, so that they are difficult to discover even for the developed spiritual eye.

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.

Weblinks

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