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

Now let us try to fmd the outer expression in the sense-world of what we have just been talking about. We have been describing what is in the supersensible—an interweaving of the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, with the Spirits of Form, the Elohim. That is something which lies in the supersensible. But everything super-sensible casts its shadow into the sense-world. What is the shadow in this case? That which in effect constitutes the body, the phenomenal existence, of the Spirits of Will is matter, outspread solid matter. The commonly accepted idea of matter is illusion. When the seer turns his attention to the places where matter is supposed to lead its dubious existence, he does not find the fantastic apparition of physical matter, for that is an empty dream. Matter as conceived by the physicists is pure fantasy. So long as these concepts are merely used as calculating devices it is all right. But when men think that they have discovered something self-existent and real, then they are dreaming. The theories of modern physics are in fact dreams. In so far as physicists take note of facts, describe facts—the real and actual which the eye can see, and what can be deduced from that by calculation—they are dealing with reality. But as soon as they begin to speculate about atoms and molecules, as if these were simply material entities, then they begin to spin a dream-universe; and one which reminds us of Felix Balde's ducats in my Mystery Play, when he says in the temple: “Fancy telling a man from whom you wanted to buy something: ‘I won't pay for it in solid coin, but I promise to condense some ducats out of some mist!’” This crude simile really does give a fair idea of the sort of physical theory that gaily assumes whole universes to have been constructed out of cosmic mist. It is pure fantasy to take the existence of atoms, as envisaged today, to be real. So long as atoms are looked upon merely as counters, or shorthand notes for what the senses actually show, we remain on solid ground. If one wants to penetrate behind the sense-perceptible basis, then one has to rise to the spiritual, and then one reaches the living movement of a basic substance which is none other than the body of the Thrones, permeated by the activity of the Spirits of Form. And how is that projected into our sense-world? In the sense-world it becomes the expanse of solid matter, but matter which is at no stage amorphous. The amorphous, the formless, only results from the fact that all existence which tends towards form gets crushed or ground down. None of the dust which we find in the world is dust by natural tendency. It is stuff which has been worn away. Matter has the tendency to take form, to become crystalline. Solid matter tends towards the form of the crystal. So we can say that it is the substance of the Thrones and of the Elohim which compresses itself into our sense-existence to become revealed as the solid matter we see around us. In the act of making manifest what we call matter, it announces itselfas the essential Being of the Thrones; in so far as this basic substance takes on form, takes on shape, it announces itself as the external revelation of the Elohim.