Some Thoughts on Theosophical "Elementals"

A Study of the Invisible World

The Theosophists have an interesting cosmological scheme.

Now, when I say interesting, I do not therefore mean that it is a correct one; just that it is fascinating in its syncretic eclecticism, and sometimes even hints at truer and deeper meanings…even despite itself, as it were.

I have had occasion to speak of the Theosophists before, often dismissively, and with good cause; despite their professed anti-materialism, they are quite hopelessly materialistic and evolutionistic, with an amusing potpourri of ancient and often incompatible traditions grafted onto a nineteenth-century scientistic foundation.

But even so, as I said, something intriguing—and even halfway limning, in outline form, a more profound esoteric truth—tends to pop up in their cosmogony from time to time. For instance, I’ve had occasion to mention before the matter of Theosophical “elementals,” which can be broadly connected with what in present-day jargon might be called paranormal entities or even cryptids. Each culture has its own terminology for such beings, but in the Celtic tradition of the British Isles they are often denominated “fairies”—not, of course, the tiny wingéd folk of popular representation, but the much more ambivalent Daoine Sìth, habetrots, clurichauns, οἱ Προῦνοι, Derroes, brownies, Dusii, spriggans, knockers and knackers, plant annwn, Brūni, Orcadian trowies, and others too numerous to list.

The Theosophists, however, have their own interesting interpretation of these strange, crepuscular beings:

“Contrasting with the popular imaginative image of the fairy is the theosophical concept of elementals, which are life forms in the evolutionary process. The theosophical view of the development of consciousness on a cosmic scale recognizes two phases. In the first, or involution, undifferentiated consciousness is increasingly immersed into matter and thereby limited and constricted. In the second, or evolution, consciousness becomes increasingly differentiated, sensitive, and expansive, embracing its environment ever more fully and completely.

“Each of the two phases has several major stages in which consciousness is embodied in and expressed through an appropriate ‘kingdom’ of nature. The pivotal kingdom is the mineral, which is the turning point between intellectual involution and evolution, when consciousness is least aware of its environment, being most immersed in and dominated by matter. The succeeding evolutionary kingdoms are the vegetable, animal, and human (and beyond the human still more evolved superhuman kingdoms). Preceding the mineral are involutionary or elemental kingdoms, corresponding to the evolutionary ones, but developing toward less rather than greater conscious awareness.

“Just as the vegetable, animal, and human kingdoms consist of living centers of consciousness in plants, beasts, and people, so the elemental kingdoms also consist of living centers of consciousness of three main types, known collectively as elementals, which are the basis for the literary, artistic, and imaginative images of fairies…”¹

Moreover, we also learn that elementals:

“…have no fixed form, but instead bodies that can be molded and shaped in the perception of human beings who come into contact with them, whether or not those human beings are aware of that fact. This characteristic explains the descriptions that clairvoyants have given of the elementals as corresponding with the popular image of fairies. Because the clairvoyant has that popular image in mind, it is projected onto and consequently models the formal appearance of the elemental, which in itself is purely a center of force.”²

Furthermore:

“The shapes with which [elementals] are seen are due to the preconceived images of the person seeing them or due to the collective impressions of those people. Such collective impressions help create the definite shape of the nature spirits.

“Elementals are responsible for a number of psychical phenomena. In the after-death state, elementals animate the astral shells left behind by souls who have entered Devachan after the second death…It causes the shells to appear as if living, since they carry the personal memories of the person who just died. It is these that the mediums usually contact during seances.

[…]

“Elementals are also connected with the animation of thought-forms produced by human beings. Due to elementals, thoughts become active intelligences after they are produced and may persist for a long or short period depending upon the intensity with which they were produced. As such they become sources of influence to the minds of people—becoming a beneficent power if good, or a maleficent demon if evil.”³

Now, I will leave aside the accuracy of some of these cited observations, which conflict in many ways with Traditional understandings of these matters. But what is interesting is that the Theosophical concept of the elemental is not totally wide of the mark, and finds some slight confirmation in the Traditionalist notions of the subtle inferior forces that are clandestinely at work in the world.

It is, for one thing, highly suggestive that the Theosophists believe that these elementals are a kind of psychical mirror to the human collective subconscious, reflecting in their phenomenal forms the cultural preconceptions of those that glimpse them. The Theosophists were more correct in this than perhaps even they guessed, for the nature and kinds of “paranormal entities” change in lockstep with mankind—the pixie or kobold or Tommyknocker of our grandfathers’ time has transformed into the Mothman, Dover Demon, Beast of Bray Road, and even, in some cases perhaps, the “extraterrestrial” visitant of our own day.

There is much more to say about this. For instance, the Theosophist Geoffrey Hodson wrote a book, Kingdom of the Gods,⁴ in which he documented, as a kind of manual, the taxonomy of the “gods” he observed through his claimed clairvoyant faculty; the gods, in this case, represent what might be termed the angelic orders—superhuman beings that are further on the evolutionary scale in the Theosophic scheme, at the opposite pole to the lower, involutionary rungs occupied by the elementals.

That is a dubious interpretation, at best, but Hodson’s clairvoyance is not to be lightly dismissed; to anyone who has been atop a high, lonely mountain peak—which is where many of Hodson’s gods were represented as dwelling—and is not totally insensate to the subtler forces, there is almost always an unmistakable presence there that is intelligent and decidedly non-human.

As our world has sunk further into materialization, and progressed ever more deeply in time toward the nadir of the Kali-Yuga, the manifestation of these Theosophical elementals, these paranormal beings, has become less and less perceptible to our materialized and densified brains. This exactly parallels the progression from childhood to adulthood; I remember seeing things when a child, strange creatures that looked back and saw me, that others—adults and older children—could not. These were not the fancies of a small child; I can see them in my mind’s eye, very clearly, as I write these words.

By the same token, in earlier ages, people routinely saw things that we cannot see today. This can be clearly demonstrated not only in the mythology of earlier centuries, but in the “scientific” geographies of the Romans and the early Muslims. The Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder is full of this sort of thing, with its terrifying country of the aegipans near Mt. Atlas; or the race of the Blemmyes, monstrous beings with faces in their chests; or the dog-sized ants in the country of the Dardae, or the one-eyed Arimaspi of Scythia, forever warring with the gryphons. Even the sober historian Plutarch recounts the tale of the Roman general Sulla’s men finding and capturing a satyr in Greece, and it was said that St. Anthony encountered such creatures during his time in the desert.

The Arab geometers, like al-Qazwini and Buzurg ibn Shahriyār, are especially fantastic sources for these sorts of tales—of the himantopodes or strap-legged folk (memorialized most famously as the “Old Man of the Sea” of Sindbad’s Fifth Voyage in The Thousand and One Nights), or the Zaratan or “fish-island,” or those strange islands like Ed-Douda or Poelsetton, shunned by navigators, whence the sounds of demon wailing were said to issue. And then there are the stories of unicorns, dragons, giants, vampire-women, androphagous plants, and other wonders, as discovered in the pages of the Alexander Romance, or Jordanus Catalani, or my own namesake, Sir John Mandeville.

These are scoffed at, and dismissed as traveler’s tales; that is not entirely inaccurate, of course, but it is also not the case that all these strange stories are false. Conflated with other creatures, perhaps, misreported and misremembered and garbled in some cases, certainly; but the centaurs and pegasi and syrens and manticores and catoblepases of these ancient geographers and mythographers needn’t all be imagined—there were things seen in those days, or in the recent memory of those then living, that cannot be seen today.

In other words, there were things—it is an imprecise word, necessarily, because we haven’t the language to express these ideas with greater exactness—that manifested themselves more commonly, and to more people, than today; for the minds of our ancestors were less crass, less submerged in the cloying stuff of matter, than we. Only very exceptional minds, with exceptional faculties, can perceive these beings today.

In this age of rampant materialism and insensateness, we are often only granted an awareness of the invisible world through vicarious means. For instance, the weird, unclassifiable stories of certain writers, such as an Edgar Allan Poe (especially his masterpiece The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), an Arthur Machen or William Hope Hodgson, or, yes, even an H. P. Lovecraft. This latter was a rank and incorrigible materialist and evolutionist, thoroughly committed to the physicalist and positivist errors…and yet, in the irony of ironies, his works speak to a greater truth than even he ever knew, and have inspired subsequent generations with a greater appreciation of the invisible world—and, most importantly, a subtle feeling for the hidden history of the world—than many writers before or since. God works through strange instruments, and that is as fine an example as we’re ever likely to find: a committed votary of scientism, and a perverse rejecter of the invisible world, who did much to cultivate in his readers—through the medium of myth—a very real sense of this unseen dimension of life.

I’ll close with a warning: we are no longer capable of apprehending the Theosophical “elementals” quite as well as the men of two thousand, or a thousand, or even a few centuries ago. This might strike some as a tragedy.

Perhaps. But it is more likely a mercy. For the nature of these beings has changed, even as the world changes, and sinks ever further into the chaos and disorder of the Kali-Yuga. This is what René Guénon hinted at when he spoke of the cracks in the Great Wall, the widening fissures in the psychic shell that a materialized mankind had inadvertently erected about itself, and the welling up from below of those subtle inferior forces that have always companioned our species…though countered, once upon a time, by superior forces that no longer have access to our world.

So I will repeat a motto that I have seen from time to time, inscribed above the entrance to the headquarters or certain chapterhouses of the College of Seth: ΜΗ ΦΥCΙΝ ΕΜΒΛΕΨΗC • ΕΙΜΑΡΜΕΝΟΝ ΟΥΝΟΜΑ ΤΗCΔΕ,⁵ which may be translated as “Lookest not upon Nature: her name is Destiny.” That is a verse quoted from the Chaldean Oracles, and I am told that its esoteric meaning is something rather like Nietzsche’s famous admonition about not looking into the Abyss: that one mustn’t gaze overlong at the unseen world, lest its denizens take notice, and mete a rather unwelcome fate to the improvident seeker.

Alas, I think there are many signs in this late hour that the “elementals” are beginning to take notice of us…

1. “Fairies.” Theosophical Encyclopedia (Quezon City, Philippines: Theosophical Publishing House, 2006), pg. 236.

2. Ibid.

3. Op. cit., “Elemental(s),” pg. 219.

4. Geoffrey Hodson, The Kingdom of the Gods (Adyar, Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1966).

5. “μὴ φύσιν ἐμβλέψῃς ・εἱμαρμένον οὔνομα τῆσδε” (Fragment 102 from The Chaldean Oracles [trans. Ruth Majercik. Wiltshire, UK: The Prometheus Trust, 2013]).