120 @ The Secret Lfe of Natureingredient, banished from the vocabulary of academia since the time of
Plato-the notion, embarrassing to science, of the effect of love in na-
ture. Love and self-sacrifice are to spiritual science the prime require-
ments for life on earth.Without the self-sacrifice of nature spirits there
would be, says Steiner, no so-called generative propagation of plants.
Neither the four elements nor the four ethers, says Steiner, are
creators: they are merely potential for the formation of physical sub-
stance. To become substance, something more must supervene. Two
of Steiner's more eminent anthroposophical colleagues, Guenther
Wachsnluth and Ernst Marti, the former in his book The Etheric For-
mative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man, the latter in The Four Ethers,
struggled valiantly to make comprehensible the mechanics of "etheric
formative forces." Both fell short-perhaps for fear of alienating their
academic colleagues with what might sound too much like a fairy
story-by failing to identifj these forces for what they really saw them
to be: the nature spirits of the elemental world, guided by superior
spirits. Ernst Hagemann, another eminent anthroposophist, is more
courageous. In his Weltenaether-Elementar-wese-Naturreiche he gathers
together every available Steiner reference to nature spirits scattered as
they are throughout lectures given over many years.These "beingsn-
gnomes, nymphs, sylphs, and salamanders-Hagemann clearly identi-
fies with the formative forces that operate at the physical level to mold
from element and ether the myriad forms of nature from blueprints
provided for them by a hierarchy of superior spirits.
When Steiner talked of etheric formative forces, he did not mean
abstract physical forces or their effects; he meant elemental beings: it
is they who are involved wherever etheric forces or formative forces
are in play.They are the long arm of the divinity, acting like the fin-
gers at the end ofAkhenaton's sun rays, to mold what passes for real-
ity out of stardust-the quarks, subquarks, and electrons of the
physicist-continually being poured into the cosmos by the divinity's
other hand. It is a dual process most felicitously depicted by the tarot
card of the Star Goddess Nuit, symbol for a cosmic channel used by
cosmic energy, or Shakti, to manifest on earth. In each hand Nuit
holds a jar from which to pour and mingle twin vortices of that in-