Down at the bottom of the soul, where all life eternally remains silent,
I can see the true dreams, like air rising from the depths of water.
Somewhere deep within me I have remained a child,
dreaming in the depths of the soul, I can love these dreams[1]
The spirit of the earth is something like an idea behind this planet. Seen from space, it is like a beautiful pearl, on whose surface, however, the destruction by man is already visible in many places. Actually, from the outside, the planet is a harmonious whole, and yet there is so much tension in its history and development. In the books of Hermes Trismegistos, a collection of texts that probably date from the beginning of our era, there is the book of Poimandres. He instructs Hermes about the cause of the origin of the world. Poimandres is a focal point that can flare up in a person’s consciousness, connecting his two sides. Two sides, time and eternity, whose contradiction and tension could not be greater. At the beginning of this book, it says:
Saying this, he changed his appearance, and in an instant, everything was immediately opened to me. I saw an endless vision in which every- thing became light – clear and joyful – and in seeing the vision I came to love it. After a little while, darkness arose separately and descended – fearful and gloomy – coiling sinuously so that it looked to me like a (snake). Then the darkness changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar. Then an inarticulate cry like the voice of fire came forth from it.
But from the light… a holy word mounted upon the (watery) nature, and untempered fire leapt up from the watery nature to the height above. The fire was nimble and piercing and active as well, and because the air was light it followed after spirit and rose up to the fire away from earth and water so that it seemed suspended from the fire. Earth and water stayed behind, mixed with one another, so that (earth) could not be distinguished from water, but they were stirred to hear by the spiritual word that moved upon them.[2]
In this small part of the text lies hidden the whole idea, the whole spirit of the earth, in which everything presses to be known and conscious in man. For just as this image applies to the earth in its duality, so at the same time it shows the dual nature of man.
This small vision of creation makes clear how light is released from something dark and heavy in a lengthy process of development. It forms four qualities in a further process of differentiation. They span a space of creation, a space-time continuum in which life can develop. The images that the visionary describes do not convey a harmonious picture of this world. Sound, form, and movement rather convey the feeling of an agony in which development and history take place. Alignment occurs from outside through forces that can only act inductively, i.e. indirectly, on this world and its history. This inductive force is able to differentiate four forces from the dark mass, which Poimandres calls earth, water, fire and air. They are probably not the realms we call them today. They are rather philosophical principles that act as fundamental forces in a material world. The slowing force of earth that makes form possible, the mobility of water that creates change, the upward force that makes any subtle idea visible and the form-dissolving fire that finally releases the idea. This is greatly simplified, as each of the four also contains the other three in their effectiveness in a weakened form.
Now this world became necessary because man, created in the image of God, also had to experience all areas of the divine nature.
With this world, man was given the opportunity to clothe himself in matter with a material body, to lose himself in it, in order to find himself again, after many sometimes-painful experiences, in his original being. The parable of the prodigal son in the New Testament in Luke 15 throws light on this theme. Whoever gives his life to really not avoid all aspects of the light, and among them also the darkness, and has his experiences, experiences that he can never be lost to the light because of his innermost being. The light, in this case his father, cannot reject him because that would mean rejecting himself. This son, who was lost and returns, thereby becomes the true image of God. For he knows all the aspects of creation that the light also knows. The bond that the prodigal son experiences on his return can therefore never be broken. It is love that dwells in him as the innermost being and at the same time is also the innermost being of the Father.
The spiritual idea of absolute unity is hidden in the core of the earth, in the core of the human being and in the essence of God and is released step by step through the experience that every human being makes in his life. This path has a peculiarity that is hidden in the “soul dress” of the earth. There are myths that tell of how man, when he entered the earth, left his soul dress at the edge of time.[3] In doing so, he also lost the gift of embracing a special feature of the earth, the entire polarity between time and eternity, and the earth became a place of forgetfulness for him. The spirit-soul garment that once protected him from uniting completely with the material aspect of the earth no longer protected him. So he was enabled to have all the experiences with the aspects of God that had previously been denied him. He pushed open the doors to the darkest rooms of the earth, had his experiences, had to suffer from his half-ness and was always looking for something of which he had forgotten what it was.
The myths continue to tell of letters, of messages reaching him, telling of a time when he lived as a perfect human being. These messages awaken dark memories, create longing. Poimandres tells of a holy Logos who approaches the world and draws to himself the fire that lies hidden in damp nature. The earth closes it, keeps this fire hidden and falls ill and suffers from it. The holy Logos releases it again, lets the sleeping man grow new wings of dawn with which he rises to the edge of time where his discarded garment awaits him.
Thus, with the help of the earth, spirit and soul separate for the deepest experiences, which are denied to every being of light, in order then to recover as the image of God. The spiritual idea of the earth is to interweave the gnostic view of light and dark, of good and evil into a solid hermetic connection of time and eternity, with experiences that perhaps prevent a renewed disentanglement. In the Gnostic separation, a consuming fire arises in which matter is transformed. When the fire has completely transformed all matter back into its origin, it becomes a pure white light again. Thus the development which is behind the spirit of the earth runs through the fiery orange which, after burning for a long time, transforms into gold and then completes itself into a white pure light.
[1] Paraphrased from “The little dragon Tabaluga”, the first strophe of the song from Nesaja
[2] The seventeen books of Hermes Trismegistos, Freimaurer Verlag Leipzig 2011
[3] https://www.anthroweb.info/erweiterungen/quellen/perlenlied.html
