Elementary Beings fi 1 11
and academicians at the University of Base1 by burning the books of
Avicenna and Galen before a class of students, informing them in-
stead-as would Rudolf Steiner some centuries later-that each per-
son possesses within himself the powers and latent faculties necessary
to become aware of a many-dimensioned universe.
On this basic notion, Manly P. Hall, the Western philosopher and
adept, in a monograph devoted to Paracelsus's mystical and medical
philosophy, commented that it "will mean the ultimate conquest of
space through the realization that there is no such thing as space, but
merely an infinite expanse of the unfolding areas of visible and invisi-
ble, known or unknown life, energy, and substance." To which Hall
added,"There is no vacuum in the universe, and the nearest thing to a
vacuum, according to Paracelsus, was the brain of one of his fellow
professors at Base1 University."
Four hundred years later, in Paracelsus's own Swiss canton, and al-
most coincident with Hodson's exploration of the fairy world in
Britain, Rudolf Steiner added his own basic lectures on the role of na-
ture spirits in the growth and development of the mineral, vegetable,
animal, and human kingdoms.
Born to Austrian parents in a remote village of Croatia in 1847,
Steiner was clairvoyant from childhood but had a hard time convinc-
ing his family that beyond the world of matter lay another whole
world of the spirit. To master both worlds he trained himself at the
Technical University of Vienna very thoroughly in physics, mathemat-
ics, biology, and chemistry, devoting his spare time to optics, botany,
and anatomy. Aware that science, as taught in the academies, negating
the spirit, could understand in matter only that which was dead,
never the living process, he determined to debate the orthodox on their
own ground by acquiring a doctorate in philosophy. His thesis was sim-
ple: a new, exact, and scientific form of clairvoyance would have to be
included in the scientific approach if the half-truths of materialism
were not to drag the world into a materialist and mechanistic disaster.
Exploring the world of nature spirits, Steiner opened up another
dimension with fascinating details about the way in which gnomes,
undines, sylphs, and fire spirits go about their part in the symphony of