The Hierarchies ~9 143
not only fire spirits but also sylphs and undines appear to experience
bliss by sacrificing their lives in order to be inhaled back into their
originating hierarchies, in whom they can then live indefinitely. As
Steiner explains it: "Undines and sylphs have a need for death. They
feel they only have a life when they die. Dying is really the beginning
of life for them as they stream out of earthly matter to offer themselves
to higher beings as nourishment."
Steiner's vision affords him a poetic description of the final stages
and self-immolation of his "very useful elemental beings." In summer,
when seas such as the Baltic begin to "blossom," as sailors call it, and
the heat causes fish to decay, imparting a peculiar putrefactive smell,
undines are described as being truly in their element. "This is not un-
pleasant to the undines as the sea becomes for them a wonderful phos-
phorescent play of color in every shade of blue, violet, and green. The
whole decomposition in the sea becomes a glimmering and gleaming
of the darker colors up to green."
Undines, so described, absorb this color into themselves, becoming
phosphorescent, longing to rise upward, to soar and offer themselves as
earthly substance to the higher hierarchies, to angels, archangels, and so
on. In this sacrifice they are said to find their bliss, living on within the
higher hierarchies.
Even the song of birds ascends spiritually into the far reaches of
space "to nourish the highest of the spiritual hierarchies, the Seraphim,
who then pour the song back onto earth as a blessing for man."
Meanwhile, says Steiner, dying birds fill the air with astral substance
that they would like to have delivered to the higher hierarchies in order
to release it from the earth, but for this they need an intermediary. "So
the sylphs hover in this astrality, taking up what comes from the dying
bird-world, and carry it up into the heights, to be inhaled by beings of
the higher hierarchies.The sylphs flash like blue lightning through the
air, and into this blue lightning-which assumes green then redder
tones-they absorb this astrality and dart up like lightning flashes to be
inhaled by the beings of the hierarchies, and experience immortality."
It is, indeed, a carousel of life played to the music of the spheres, La
Ronde on the grandest scale.