8. The Elementary World and its Beings

The elemental beings of air have developed to a high degree what lives in the human will. It is splendid that the analytical chemist discovers the atomic weight of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and that he finds out how hydrogen and oxygen combine into water to be further analyzed or else how chloride of lime is analyzed, and so on. But elemental spiritual beings are active behind all this and it is essential that man should acquire insight into their characteristics. During the period in which man developed the intellect—as already mentioned, this was from the first third of the 15th Century to the end of the 19th Century—these elemental beings were pushed to one side, as it were. While the intellect played a creative part in man's cultural life there was not much they could do; and because the elemental beings dwelling in solids had, in a certain sense, to hold back and leave the intellect to man, they also held back the beings of water and air. But now we live at a time when the intellect has begun to decline within the civilized world; it is falling into decadence. If mankind does not become receptive to what streams towards him from the spiritual world then the result of this dullness on man's part will be—and there are signs already of it happening—that these elemental beings will gather together to form a kind of union and place themselves under the leadership of the supreme intellectual power: Ahriman.