Section XIV. The Four Elements.
Metaphysically and esoterically, there is but One Element in Nature, and at the root of it is the Deity; and the so-called seven Elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the garment, the veil, of that Deity, direct from the essence whereof comes Man, whether considered physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually. Four Elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, while five only are admitted in philosophy. For the body of Ether is not fully manifested yet, and its noumenon is still the “Omnipotent Father Æther,” the synthesis of the rest. But what are these Elements, whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry and Physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer embrace the whole number suspected? Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.
The Four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.” Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetichism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the Noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits, the Cosmic Gods, to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, but respectful, recognition by the wiser. In their turn, the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so-called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.
In the Theogony of Môchus, we find Ether first, and then the Air; [pg 499] the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (νοητὸς) God, the visible Universe of Matter, is born.[763]
In the Orphic hymns, the Erôs-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” which is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos,” the Divine Idea. In the Hindû Kathopanishad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, and from their union springs the great Soul of the World, “Mahâ-Âtmâ, Brahman, the Spirit of Life”;[764] these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi; the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists being its last and lowest division.
The Elements (στοιχεῖα) of Plato and Aristotle were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines these primitive beliefs as “a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies.”[765] So close, indeed, that the Hierarchies of these Potencies, or Forces, have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are septenary, not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension, but in their real cosmic gradation, from their chemical, or physical, to their purely spiritual composition. Gods with the ignorant masses; Gods independent and supreme; Demons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the Hermetic philosopher they are Forces relatively “blind” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves finally, in our cultured age, degraded into simple chemical elements.
At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants, ought to show more reverence for the Four Elements, if they would maintain any for Moses. For the Bible manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew temples, according to Clemens [pg 500] Alexandrinus,[766] a gigantic curtain, supported by five pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum—now represented by the altar in Christian churches—wherein the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours this curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and with the five pillars signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements.
In Cory's Ancient Fragments, one of the “Chaldean Oracles” expresses ideas about the elements and Ether in language singularly like that of The Unseen Universe, written by two eminent Scientists of our day.
It states that from Ether have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store-house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple-minded ancestors.”
Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Âryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci, a very late afterthought of the last sub-races of the Fifth Root-Race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues. It was the God of Fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the God of Water, symbolized by the fluvial bull, or some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the God of Air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vâyu and Indra; and the God or Spirit of the Earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.