II. We find, in the next place, the doctrine of Elemental

spirits, which it is a common error to suppose originated
with the Eosicrucians. This graceful and fanciful hypo-
thesis also owes its development, if not its invention,
to the seer of Hohenheim. It was naturalised on French
soil by the author of the " Comte de Gabalis," and is
known chiefly in England through the preface to " The
Eape of the Lock," and of later years through the German
" Komance of Undine," which has been many times
translated.5 " When you shall be numbered among the
Children of the philosophers," says the " Comte de Gabalis,"
"and when your eyes shall have been strengthened
by the use of the most sacred medecine, you will learn that
the Elements are inhabited by creatures of a singular per-
fection, from the knowledge of, and communication with,
whom the sin of Adam has deprived his most wretched
posterity. Yon vast space stretching between earth and
Heaven has far nobler dwellers than the birds and the
gnats ; these wide seas hold other guests than the whales
and the dolphins j the depths of the earth are not reserved
for the moles alone ; and that element of fire which is
nobler than all the rest was not created to remain void and
useless." According to Paracelsus, "the Elementals are
not spirits, because they have flesh, blood, and bones ; they
live and propagate offspring ; they eat and talk, act and
sleep, &c. . . . They are beings occupying a place between
1 "Paracelsus," by Franz Hartmann, M.D., p. 44.

ROSICRUC1ANISM, ALCHEMY, AND MAGIC. 203

men and spirits, resembling men and women in their or-
ganisation and form, and resembling spirits in the rapidity
of their locomotion." They must not be confounded with the
Elementaries which are the astral bodies of the dead.1 They
are divided into four classes. " The air is replete with an
innumerable multitude of creatures, having human shapes,
somewhat fierce in appearance, but docile in reality ; great
lovers of the sciences, subtle, serviceable to the Sages, and
enemies of the foolish and ignorant. Their wives and
daughters are beauties of the masculine type. . . . The
seas and streams are inhabited even as the air ; the ancient
Sages gave the names of Undines or Nymphs to these Ele-
mentals. There are few males among them, and the women
are very numerous, and of extreme beauty ; the daughters
of men cannot compare with them. The earth is filled by
gnomes even to its centre, creatures of diminutive size,
guardians of mines, treasures, arid precious stones. They
furnish the Children of the Sages with all the money they
desire, and ask little for their services but the distinction
of being commanded. The gnomides, their wives, are tiny,
but very pleasing, and their apparel is exceedingly curious.
As to the Salamanders, those fiery dwellers in the realm of
flame, they serve the Philosophers, but do not eagerly seek

1 According to Eliphas LeVi, the Astral Light, i.e., the substance
diffused through infinity, and which is the first matter of the material
and psycho-material universe, is " transformed at the moment of
conception into human light, and is the first envelope of the soul. " In
combination with fluids of extreme subtlety, it becomes the astral,
etherised, or sidereal body. When a man dies and the divine spirit
returns into the empyrean, it leaves two corpses, one on the earth and
one in the atmosphere, "one already inert, the other still animated
by the universal movement of the soul of the world, but destined to
die gradually, being absorbed by the astral energies which produced
it."—" Mysteries of Magic," pp. 97, 105.

204 HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.

their company, and their wives and daughters are seldom
visible. They transcend all the others in beauty, for they
are natives of a purer element." l