6. Elementary Existence and the Spiritual Beings behind it. Jahve-Elohim

If we now reascend from the solid to the watery condition, we may reflect that it took longer to build up and densify the earth element than the watery. Hence we have to look for the fundamental forces of the watery element in Beings of a lower hierarchy. For the condensation of the watery element, as it is at work around us in the elementary state, it needed only the activity of the Spirits of Wisdom, the Kyriotetes, the Dominions. Thus behind the solid basis we see the Spirits of Will, and, not behind physical water, but behind the forces of fluidity, we have to see the activity of the Spirits of Wisdom or Kyriotctes. When we ascend to the airy element, here we have to see a still lower hierarchy at work. In the airy formations around us, to the extent that they are brought about by forces lying behind them, we have also to see the effect of the activity of certain spirits of the hierarchies. Just as the Spirits of Wisdom work in the water nature, so the Spirits of Movement—the Dynameis, the Mights, as we are accustomed to call them in Christian esotericism—are at work in the aeriform. And when we come to the warmth nature, to the next stage of rarefaction, then it is the next lower hierarchy, the Spirits of Form—the Exusiai—who live and weave within it, the very spirits whom we have been speaking of for days as the Elohim. Up to the present we have, from quite a different direction, characterised the Spirits of Form as the Spirits who brooded in the warmth element. When we trace the order of the hierarchies in the downward direction from the Spirits of Will, through the Spirits of Wisdom and the Spirits of Movement, we come back to our Elohim, to the Spirits of Form. You see how everything fits together, if the threads are woven in the right way. If you now try to bring sensitive and perceptive feeling into all this, you will say that behind all we see around us through our senses there lies an elementary existence—an earth element, but within this element in truth there live the Spirits of Will; a fluid element, in which in truth live the Spirits of Wisdom; an airy element, within which in truth live the Spirits of Movement; and a warmth element, wherein in truth live the Spirits of Form, the Elohim.