Elementals
Ian Elliott October, 2011
Time and Perception:
Elementals are described in stregheria and other Craft traditions as existing at a frequency of vibrations close to those of our own physical dimension, but slightly higher. This is why they can interact with witches and help them elevate their energies somewhat, gaining access to the astral plane. They do this by elevating the witch’s rate of perception and sense of time.
In order to understand the relationship between perception and time, let us consider old-time silent movies. These were called ‘flicks,’ because they had fewer frames per second than later sound pictures. The illusion of movement produced by motion pictures, as we know, is caused by a series of still photographs displayed one after another too quickly for the mind to distinguish them as separate frames. The frames in old silent films succeeded each other at the edge of the mind’s ability to see them separately, with the result that they seemed to flicker. When later technology photographed more frames per second, this flicker went away. The frames were now displayed one after another too quickly for the mind to detect the illusion.
A movie came out a few years ago about the introduction of motion pictures into China. It is called ‘Shadow Magic,’ which was the term Chinese used to describe the new technology. This term can be traced back to the 2nd century CE Book of Lieh-Tzu, which contains a lot of material from a few centuries earlier, including some of the paradoxes of a sophist named Kung-sun Lung. He maintained that a shadow does not move. A commentator named Ssu-ma Piao explained this by saying: “The bird screens the light as the fish excludes the water. When the fish moves it excludes the water but the water does not move. When the bird moves a shadow appears, and wherever the shadow appears the light disappears. But appearing and disappearing are not coming and going.” (Lieh-tzu, p. 89 fn.) This is obviously the principle employed in making still frames appear to move in films.
In the same way, the whirling of atomic particles in an empty void, which are both too small and too fast to see, produces the illusion of solid matter for us. As we achieve inner stillness, our minds are freed from inner talk and are able to apprehend inner and outer perceptions a little more quickly. Externally, this makes the world around us appear brighter and fresher, and feelings seem to flow to us from trees, clouds, etc.. Internally, we are more sensitive to feelings and silent intuitions. When we are quieter in our minds, elementals can come and share their powers with us
Sylphs – Air – Knowledge:
Knowledge depends on understanding, so in a more direct sense, understanding is what a sylph will impart to a witch partner. Knowledge in the Craft sense is no mere accumulation of facts or theories. There are people who have strong powers of memorization. They know a great body of facts, theories and words, but they understand all of it in only a few ways, or even in only one way. As time goes by, the more they learn, the less they understand. Everything they know is flattened out and exists on only one level. If you tell them something they haven’t heard before, they will immediately find something in their storehouse of information that the new piece of knowledge resembles, and they will quickly file it next to that item. In terms of air, they are like someone who cannot take in a full breath of fresh air, because his lungs are already nearly full of old, stale air. This old, stale elemental energy of air is a form of miasma.
When we are young we literally breathe in new knowledge with enthusiasm, a word meaning ‘breathing in the god.’ The things we learn early in life generally become lifelong favorites, whereas the knowledge we pick up later in life interests us only as it falls into one or another of these categories acquired earlier. All of this indicates that there is a special energy governing the intake of fresh understanding, and without the help of sylphs our natural store of this energy is not renewed and diminishes as we grow older until it is virtually depleted.
When the witch undergoes the first initiation and receives a sylph as a personal helper or partner from Paralda, it enters into the wand and receives a name by which the witch will call on it for help in understanding something new. As the witch progresses in the Inner Craft, he or she will occasionally experience new spurts of enthusiasm in connection with topics or subjects either long dormant in memory or never before learned. Through the offices of the sylph, the witch is beginning to recover his or her lost youth of soul.
Salamanders – Fire – Will:
People who are deficient in the elemental energy of fire like to learn but seem incapable of applying what they have learnt to make changes in their lives. They prefer more desultory reading to attempting something new in life. Over time, their lives come to a standstill, as they revolve in an ever-tightening circle among a few activities. They seem unable to exert themselves when it is called for, and when they do act they frequently go on repeating old mistakes, making futile, half-hearted attempts. When you point this out to them, they say “I know, I know,” and then go on following the same course as before. They are usually very lazy and lack self-discipline. The only will power they exhibit is in resisting the advice of others. They insist on their independence and feel proud of it, even though they go year by year revolving in a circle and never getting anywhere. The longer they go on in this way, the less they will have of their natural store of the elemental energy of fire, until they literally cannot move.
This shows us that will power is something separate from knowledge, for such people may know a lot but are increasingly unable to do anything with their knowledge. There is therefore no will apart from action. When we know what we must do or want to do in a situation, we must exert ourselves in order to do it. In every case, such exertion involves a certain amount of friction, though in ordinary actions it may be so slight as to be practically unnoticeable. Each time, nevertheless, we must overcome a certain amount of inertia, and the effort to do so produces a small or larger amount of friction.
In cases where our available will power is approximately equal to the inertia to be overcome, it becomes evident that extra help is needed. We need additional energy, and this is provided the witch by his or her personal salamander partner. Will overcoming inertia produces a certain amount of friction or elemental heat, called tapas by the Hindus. The extra energy provided by the salamander produces a small surplus of tapas which is stored, replenishing one’s natural supply of this sort of elemental energy. This means we shall have more energy of will available for later exertions. The store of will energy can become so immense that the witch is capable of prodigious feats of discipline and endurance, limited only by his or her physical vitality.
Undines – Water – Daring:
As we have seen, progress around the Sun-wheel is cumulative. If you have a lot of will-energy but are deficient in understanding, you will be an able drudge but will not accomplish anything of significance. Understanding must be added to will, as it is for many people who succeed in life.
There are a lot of successful people who, over the years, settle into comfortable ruts of regular accomplishment. They may learn new skills and take in new information, and they may apply these skills and information to their lives efficiently, but over time their very success limits them to certain viewpoints and achievements. If they find themselves in a crisis that calls for radically different thinking, they may flounder. They are used to controlling all the variables, and faced with a number of unknowns, they tend to fall back on established routines. Continual success breeds a sort of timidity; they like their lives to run in safe, smooth channels. Faced with what the philosopher Jaspers called ‘boundary situations’ : failure, disease, unavoidable involvement in evil, great personal disappointment and the like, they retreat and sometimes break down.
At the same time, as the years go by, their accomplishments begin to grow stale. Life is no longer an adventure for them. Something in them longs to throw off familiar constraints and surroundings and start life afresh. They long to exercise the daring they employed in their youth. They may feel, as they go into later middle age, that it is now or never. The reason is, they feel the leaching away and drying up of their elemental energy of daring, derived from water and the undines, and fear to live out the balance of their lives as timid persons. If they do not take chances and risk great things, they may be destroyed in the future by bereavement or some other crisis.
Sometimes it takes a crisis to liberate the remaining energy of daring in someone. When water encounters an obstacle, it takes the form of that obstacle and flows around or under it. Water always seeks the lowest point, and overcomes resistance by yielding to it and finding ways around it, by ‘thinking outside the box,’ as the saying goes. When someone beloved dies, if the bereaved has sufficient water-energy, he or she will take the form of life without that person, of the absent beloved, letting go of him or her, and then flow on to new horizons. If that energy is gone, bereaved people often fold in on themselves and soon pass away, being unable or unwilling to dare to go beyond their current limits and find a new way of living.
This same energy of daring is exercised by the witch in going beyond everyday awareness into sensitivity to the astral world. It is paramount to have this energy when undergoing initiation, which is a sort of death. Similarly, one may decide that one’s options in a given place have been exhausted, and decide to migrate somewhere else far away. The shiploads of immigrants who landed at Bedloes Island in New York harbor a hundred years or more ago were mostly people who had been driven to the point of desperation in the old country, and were forced to reach inside for their reserves of daring-energy in order to gain the courage to move halfway around the world. Those who could not leave, like Dr. Zhivago, stayed in the old country and went down.
Partnership with the undine makes the witch fluid within. Each day comes with its own separate agenda of possibilities. The seer, said Ramakrishna, may live for years in a place, and one day just get up and go off to Benares.
Gnomes – Earth – Silence:
It is a commonplace to say that there are two kinds of people in the world, and then name two contrasting qualities. But for witches, the most important difference between people is whether or not they have the power of inner silence.
The North, in the Craft, is called ‘the place of power,’ because the elemental power of Earth, the power to keep silence or still, is the master power. It is the basis of all the other powers of elementals we have been considering. New understanding cannot be had if the mind is continually resounding with old ideas and information. New projects cannot be started if one’s daily agenda is cluttered with a lot of old, unfinished tasks. One cannot set sail for new horizons while hemmed in by old fears and timidity.
But in addition to these, outer and inner silence, of both mind and body, has value in itself. Gnomes are of the Earth, and live underground. They can ascend from the depths or descend back into them. These depths are not only in the physical Earth, but within each of us, for we each contain a cosmos in miniature. The spine corresponds to the World Pillar, the axis of the Earth round which the planet revolves. The quiet mind, aided by the partner gnome, can descend through the spine below the level of everyday mental chatter to ever-increasing levels of quiet within. Deep within each of us lie all our memories from the past in this incarnation, and deeper still, far memories from past lives. If we descend far enough, we shall reach the Summerland and merge into our root-souls, the place where we go when the body drops off and it is time to recuperate between incarnations.
As we descend below the level of mental talk, we become free of all sorts of suggestions, provided by habits, as to how to live each day, what to feel, what to think and so forth. Below the level of talk we encounter an intermediate level of inner whisperings. At this level we are free to break old habits and form new ones. Still farther down, the whisperings speed up and turn into silent energy flows which are sources of intuition and creative inspiration. Our perception of time accelerates as we descend, so that more happens in each moment of time, until we can no longer translate the silent insights into slow, cumbersome language.
As past memories become available to the descending mind, they are accompanied by the way it felt to be alive years ago. We recapture our sense of ourselves at earlier ages, and our sense of the world and what it was like to live in it. These are restored to the surface personality when the witch ascends and emerges once more at the everyday level of inner talk.
The power to descend and re-ascend belongs to a part of the soul that is usually quiet and stays in the background while the noisy, social part lives its showy life here above. This surface personality is called ‘the life soul’ by Michael York in his study, Pagan Theology (NYU Press, 2001). The life soul’s silent partner he calls the dream soul, because in many cultures it begins its descent from dreams, lucid dreams in which the dreamer knows he or she is dreaming. But the descent can also be made in a peculiar waking state that may be called ‘lucid waking’. In the latter case, one’s physical surroundings remain in view but the lower levels of the inner pillar are added to one’s usual senses in the form of feelings or other senses for which we have no names. In dream descents, as the dream soul descends with the gnome, the life soul stands guard over the body.
In raising the Cone of Power, witches descend into their ‘deep’ and bring back up all the energies, dark as well as light, that they find there. These are released into the common vortex as the spell is launched into the astral world.
