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ON THE ELEMENTS. 499
the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (vorjrcx;) God, the
visible Universe of Matter, is born.*
In the Orphic hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual
Egg, which the Ethereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the "Spirit
of God," which is said to move in ^ther, "brooding over the Chaos,"
the Divine Idea, In the Hindu Kathopariishad, Purusha, the Divine
Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, and from their union
springs the great Soul of the World, "Maha-Atma, Brahman, the Spirit
of Life";t these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal
Soul, or Anima Mundi ; the Astral Eight of the Theurgists and
Kabalists being its last and lowest division.
The Elements (o-rotxcta) of Plato and Aristotle w^ere thus the incori)oreal
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, 2^ psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies;
a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with
these potencies.":]: 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 tmum. 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 Alexan-
• Movers, Phoinizer, 282. t Weber, Akad. Varies, 213, 214, etc. X IX. 850.