6. Worldwide Fairyland
(^1) whose members appear to them to be ravaging demons, despoiling and
/ destroying wherever they go, wantonly kdling-often with awful tor-
ture-all the beautiful creatures that nature spirits love to live with.
! Man cuts down trees, tramples the grass, plucks flowers and casts
(^1) them aside to die, and replaces the lovely wild life of nature with
hideous brick and mortar and the fragrance of flowers with the
"mephitic vapors of his chemicals and the all-polluting smoke of his
factories."
Not only do we thus bring devastation to all the nature spirits hold
most dear, but, Leadbeater warns, most of our habits and emanations
are distasteful to them, giving them the same feeling of disgust that we
would have if a bucket of filth were emptied over us. "For them to be
near the average man is to live in a perpetual hurricane-a hurricane
that has blown over a cesspool. Can one wonder that they should dis-
like, distrust, and avoid us. Can you be surprised that fairies shrink from
us as from a poisonous reptile?"
In his dscourse on nature spirits, Leadbeater highhghts the role of
evolution in their development, with a continual "upward movement"
fi-om lower to higher states.The gnome deeply buried underground he
sees tending toward the surface before malclng the leap to fairydom,
then, at a third stage, joining the enormous host of water spirits, even-
tually graduating through the air and fire spirits into the realm of angels.
Fairies of the land, according to Leadbeater, are recruited not only
Gom the ranks of gnomes but also from the less evolved strata of the
animal kingdom. This line of development just touches the vegetable
lungdom in the shape of minute fungoid growth, then passes onward
through bacteria and animalculae of various lunds, through the insects
and reptiles, up to the birds, and only after many incarnations joins the
fairies.
Another type of tiny fairy described by Leadbeater has a different
origin: one of the conmonest forms is like a tiny hummingbird, often
seen buzzing around flowers very much like a hummingbird or bee.
These charming creatures are beings, says Leadbeater, of another evo-
lutionary line, destined never to become human. The life that animates
them he describes as having come up through grasses and cereals such