1 46 fl The Secret Life fe iVatureUnder their control, myriads of elementals are spread around the earth
so that all four groups can be active in the creation of the physical
forms of weather: undines to make raindrops; fire spirits to evaporate
water; gnomes for the formation of snowflakes and hailstones.
Like architects who tell the foreman, who in turn instructs the
workers, spirits of the cycles of time are charged with giving orders to
the devas of plants, who evidently need direction or blueprints in order
to bring forth their offspring-individual plants in etheric bodies.And
just as the etheric bodies of all the nature spirits form the etheric body
of the earth, viewed clairvoyantly, so the astral body of the earth teems
with spirits of the cycles of time: it is into this world one plunges with
one's ego and one's astral body when asleep, and-if sufficiently awake
in the ego-it is these spirits one meets.When developed enough, says
Steiner, "we feel ourselves not only poured out into the whole world
of the Spirits of the Cycles of Time, we feel ourselves one with the
whole individual spirit of the planet." Its ego, as described by Steiner,
is seated at the center of the planet and consists of the egos of all the
plants on earth.
The actual etheric shape of the planet appears to be molded from
etheric substance by the exusiai, spirits of form, as Michelangelo might
mold a statue from clay. In this occult solar system each planet has its
own spirit of form, operating from the sun. Singly and in conjunction,
the function of these spirits is to produce the blueprints for all etheric
substance in the solar system.
To the occultist, the earth, in its physical form, never at rest, always
in a state of perpetual change and movement, is endowed with con-
sciousness, its inner being regulated by the kyriotetes, spirits of wis-
dom, its inner mobility dependent on the spirits of motion, the
dynanis. The impulse that drives it through space and governs its
movement, causing it to revolve around our fixed star, the sun, is the
function of the spirits of will, or thrones, lowest members of the First
Hierarchy.
And just as behind the etheric body of humans operate their astral,
mental, causal, and egoic bodies, so, says Steiner, behind our planet
come sheaths of more rarefied spiritual beings to form its finer spiri-