Elementary Beings @ 1 15
no way prevent their walking or swimming about. Only the full moon
makes them uncomfortable, obliging them to enclose themselves in a
sort of spiritual skin, like knights in armor in the light of the full moon.
Everywhere present in the earth, says Steiner, the root spirits-
mostly gnomes and brownies-derive a particular sense of well-being
from rocks and ores, which are more or less transparent to them, ob-
taining a different experience as they wander from a vein of metal to a
layer of chalk, gaining subtly different sensations as they pass through
gold, mercury, tin, silica. "They enjoy their greatest sense of well-being
when they are conveying what is mineral to the roots of plants, with-
out which the plants could not thrive."
Alive in everything pertaining to the earth, Steiner's gnomes are re-
sponsible not only for dealing with rock and metal, "but for serving as
messengers to their underground world, bringing news of the outer
encircling cosmos, relayed by undine, sylph, and salamander down
through leaf, petal, trunk and root to the underground gnomes."
Steiner describes how at a certain season of the year, plants gather
secrets from the extraterrestrial universe and sink them into the ground,
spirit-currents flowing from the blossom of the fruit down the plant
into the roots below, streaming into the earth. "What the sun has sent
to the leaves, what the air has produced in the leaves, what the distant
stars have brought about in plant structure, the plant gathers and seeps
down spiritually into the ground."
It is then, says Steiner, that earth spirits turn their faculties toward
the roots of plants, which have brought the sunlight down through the
plant into the earth, and take the secrets of the universe into them-
selves. "From autumn and on through winter, in their wanderings
through ore and rock, the gnomes, in full consciousness, become car-
riers of ideas of the universe from metal to metal, from rock to rock.
The gnomes are the light-filled preservers of world understanding
within the earth."
Although the predominant characteristic of Steiner's gnomes is an
absolutely unconquerable lust for independence, troubling themselves
little about one another, giving their attention only to their own im-
mediate surroundings, "yet everything else in the world in which they