Path_of_One asked some questions of me which I wanted to answer, so here is a somewhat delayed reply. I thought it best to start a new thread.
First, are you equating Faerie with the astral realm? And are you saying elementals exist in that realm?
No. The astral realm is, as you say, the realm of human thought - a realm of all the things created by human thought. Now undoubtedly, some would say this is not so, but then ...
Perhaps there are not solid definitions of these supernatural places and people are talking past each other and using the same word to describe different things.
And this is true. It depends upon the defining principles under which 'things' (gross or subtle, material or spiritual) in the broadest sense are structured, and even then, layers or degrees of principle, primary, secondary, etc., within an overall, or overarching, structure:
One:
There is man, in whom God and creation meet.
Two:
Man is composed of body and soul when viewed under the principle of creation as such.
Three:
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit when viewed under the principle of the place man occupies as the with the whole of the created order: body, soul and spirit.
Four:
Man operates under the principle of four - or four modes of operation - the physical (basar); the vital, etheric or blood body (nephesh); astral or psychic body (ruah); and the spiritual body (neshamah). This triune structure was disordered by the fall, allowing the emergence of the discriminating ego (psyche) which should orchestrate the three 'unseen' according to the highest principle (as above, so below) and thus "not my will but thy will be done" (Luke 22:42). The fall was brought about by the inversion "not thy will but my will be done" and so the primordial harmony of the union of nephesh-ruah-neshamah, all of which corresponds to 'wind' or 'breath', was shattered, occluded by the self-serving will (gnome) which brought psyche to the fore.
Five:
The Kaballists' nephesh-ruah-neshamah-hayah (the eternal soul)-yeshidah (the one soul).
Six:
The above plus basar - body.
Seven:
Physical body (basar), etheric body (neshamah), astral body (psyche), lower self (nous), reason (ruah), intellect (pneuma), higher self (neshamah).
There are other systems, eg the chakras, and further layers, eg the nine spiritual hierarchies, the ten Sephiroth, the twelve signs of the zodiac ... and so on.
And each 'school' orders those according to its own operative principles and understandings - and these understanding can themselves be ordered into Mystical, Gnostic, Hermetic (philosophical), Magical and Traditional.
Each higher replicates radiates into the lower, and the lower forms itself accordingly (the tension between esoterism and exoterism) unless a particular school cuts itself off from its higher source, at which point a whole raft of problems ensue as the source is effectively the will (unseen) and psyche (seen) of its founder.
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Having said all that:
I suppose I had chalked up the beings people call fae and elementals as nature spirits;
Every existing 'thing' has a 'body' be it gross or subtle, physical or spiritual, by which is is distinct from everything else, so flower faeries, for example, are the spiritual aspects of the material plant - but the 'consciousness' of a flower faerie is equal to that of a plant. If, for example flower faeries actually looked like little people, then the perfect form of a plant would be a little person ... which is nonsense ... so the flower faerie is the subtle or immaterial form of its physical counterpart.
The spirit of a crystal, for example, is its resonance. Science will say crystals resonate because of their intrinsic structure, Hermeticism wiull say a crystal is the solid or material form of the resonance itself. Without a crystalline body, the resonance cannot manifest (or radiate itself) in the material realm.
This does not mean then, that the life of a crystal is lower than the life of an angel, rather it is simpler - it is one thing in itself, whereas angels, and moreso humans, are multiple things in a unity.
Elementals are evven 'lower' than crystals because they are the 'spiritual' forms of pure energies or currents, the material form of which is colour, for example.
Having said that, in their purity as 'raw energy' they are very powerful, but possess no intelligence. exposure to elementals can be dangerous, even fatal, as, like electricity, they overstimulate their corresponding system within the human faculty. Red overstimulates the blood, for example, white the nervous system, yellow the emotions...
Flower faeries posess no more intelligence than a flower. Faeries cannot talk, although some people swear they hear them talking, others will say they hear cryptic messages, laughter, a bubbling brook, a tinkle of bells ... all that is happening is the human imagination is clothing the experience in sensory imagery ... faeries do not look like little people, the essential form of a rose is a rose, not a little person ... but because they interact with humans at a level beyond the sensible, the faculty evokes a sensible (and invariably quasi-human) form.
I've never gotten a very good, solid definition of the astral realm. It seems that all sorts of traditions have their own understandings of what it is and how people get there, and whether or not there are connections between other phenomena, like lucid dreaming and trance, and the astral plane.
Exactly.
I've heard some say it's a realm unto itself,
It is a psychic realm, the realm of the mind/imagination/fantasy.
and others say it's a gateway to a variety of places.
It exists in relation to other domains, eg physical, spiritual, but it is the human who is the nexus. The astral cannot occupy the spiritual, although the spiritual will effect the astral. (As above, so below).
Some say it's thought-forms, others that it is actual spirit-entities. Everyone claims to be basing their definition and beliefs about it on their own personal experiences.
Indeed.
I haven't heard before the idea that all these varied supernatural entities- fae, elementals, succubi/incubi, etc. are all from the same "place," so to speak.
And that was my fault, in this instance, speaking in general terms.
The astral is populated by thought-forms, or egregores. The difference being that egregores are 'artificial' or 'inventions' in that they have no essence, bearing in mind that all essences trace back to one Essence, God, through the Great Chain of Being, or by the action of Divine Plenitude. Egregores are 'unnatural' in the sense that they are not 'real' but manufactured by man (leaving fallen angels aside) by the egoic (self-determining) will, whereas the will aligned to the Divine does not manufacture but radiate the higher - "He who has seen me has seen the Father" - whereas the egoic will says "look at me."
I tend to think there are many universes, and the mythology is an attempt of people to grasp glimpses they've had of other places, not one single place.
Yes, but the immediate difference is whether the mythology is based on reality or an invention. Many people meet TV celebrities and seem unable to distinguish between the actor and the role he plays. Dan Brown's book is utter fantasy, but real for many people.
Having said that, primitive or pagan myth can open onto the Divine, modern myth tends to shut the door. Revelation subsumes eveything below it in the same way that advancing scientific theory covers every aspect of its phenomena. In that sense religion marks an evolutionary or unfolding process.
Second, I'm not sure I understand your definitions of presences vs. essences. Are you saying fae are essences but not presences, and what does that mean? I'm sorry if I'm being dense, but this is new to me and I just am not getting it. As far as I could tell in mythology, fae were personalities, spirit-entities- I would use the term presence for that. I've never been able to tell if what I read in some natural places as "nature spirits" are what others would call fae or not.
In Scripture there is the pool at Bethseda:
"Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep [market] a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches (there's a clue). In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had."
John 5:2-4
Now this I would call an essence, albeit angelic, because its operation is somewhat mechanical, according to its 'certain season' and whoever got to the water first was healed, regardless of how good or bad the person is as a person.
If, however, the angel appeared and spoke, then that would require 'intelligence' or 'presence of mind' on the part of the angel to engage in dialogue - that is what I meant, somewhat inaccurately, by 'presence'.
Put another way, that energy which has no will but does its job is an essence, that energy which has a will of its own - in the sense of a degree of self-dermination and awareness - is a presence (as opposed to the idea that an essence is present because you know it's there).
I wish I never mentioned it, as I was using it in a context I did not explain.
What should be noted here is that apart from humans and angels, nothing 'true' in nature presents itself as a self-determining or self-directing intelligence - at best there is a kind of animal awareness, and thus the possibility of a limited degree of communication, but you can't discuss philosophy with a faerie. This leads us back into the realm of the egregore - the maufactured entity.
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"One gives the name egregore to a force generated by a powerful spiritual current and then nourished at regular intervals, according to a rhythm in harmony with the universal life of the cosmos, or to a union of entities united by a common characteristic nature."
Robert Amberlain 'La Kaballe pratigue', Paris, 1951, p175)
'In the Invisible, beyond the physical perception of man, exist artificial beings - generated by devotions, enthusiasms and fanatacisms - that one names egregores.'
"Meditations on the Tarot"
"My name is legion"
The soul is not an egregore, however the body can generate its own egregore in different realms, according to the cognisance and capacity of the will. The lowest form is the as a product of the life of its cells, an etheric egregore, and this is the phantom which resists dissolution after the physical death and which can manifest as a phantom - this phantom has no conscious being as such, but is more akin to an electromagnetic recording which replays itself like a loop tape. The phantom is not to be confused with either the soul, nor the etheric and astral bodies which are the soul's subtle presence in the material realm, and its material presence in the subtle (psychic) realm resectively.
A phantom is the egregore of the body, a ghost is the egregore of the mind, and thus possesses a degree of consciousness, of self-awareness, of its own presence. It is also aware that this presence, like its phantom, is diminishing by the law of entropy, so it seeks to sustain itself by attachment to:
1 - another 'living' egregore, the easier course, but lesser, by virtue of the egregore to which its attaches, which has already begun to damage its creator-host (who is the stronger - who is the master of his habits?) which will seek to defend itself to maintain its own sustenance. (Here lies the realm of the sexual and emotional predator, of possession, of psychic disorder and mental illness, ruined health, suicide - the invasive egregore must bring the occupying egregore down to assert itself - take full possession - of its victim, ie it is a Rumplestilskin, succubus, incubus, vampire ... or a zombie, a dibbuk ... black magic, casting ther runes, curses, etc.)
2 - a pure life, much harder as its innate defences are stronger, but much more rewarding, as the first fruits of its corruption offer the sweetest savour - here lies the sacrifice of virgins, children and the innocent.
The 'power' derived from the sacrifice is not from the victim, but rather the corruption of the practitioner, whose disordered will feeds the egregore, who in turn suckles him, to drive him to greater extremes.
The point is that a 'presence' - any being that possesses the consciousness of 'presence of mind' - is either revealed (from above, is human or angelic), or it is an invention and should be shunned.
Revealed presences are souls, in the material realm, and angels, in the subtle, which are generated from above, by God, and are then revealed, according to His will, within the Cosmos ("According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world" Ephesians 1:4). The angels are actually higher because they are pure act - they exists in the fullness of their being, and are thus closer to God, whereas souls are potentially higher because they are created to be pure act in both the angelic and the material planes - as evidenced by those pure souls who have manifested such phenomena as levitation (St Francis, notably), bilocation (St Pio, most recently), or physical incorruption.
Logismoi, as I mentioned before, are the phantoms of thought; they are the stuff of fantasy and the source of our 'devotions, enthusiams and fanatacisms' - to which they are directed ('you become what you think about') - but they have no essential being, and thus nor do the egregores which they engender - they have no order of reality and for this reason they are classified as 'evil'. The imagination, on the other hand, makes present in the mind an invisible reality in a comprehensible form, in the same way that real art makes present an invisible reality in a sensory form. True art and true imagination are windows into the Infinite.
Egregores are unrestrained. A football mob, a riot, generates an egregore which lasts, then disperses, but people will hang on to the 'thrill' and this is enough to keep the egregore going.
The video industry has generated an egregore of pornography of fantastic proportion, which seeks every to make pornography acceptable, and thus more of it. The web helps in this regard.
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First, are you equating Faerie with the astral realm? And are you saying elementals exist in that realm?
No. The astral realm is, as you say, the realm of human thought - a realm of all the things created by human thought. Now undoubtedly, some would say this is not so, but then ...
Perhaps there are not solid definitions of these supernatural places and people are talking past each other and using the same word to describe different things.
And this is true. It depends upon the defining principles under which 'things' (gross or subtle, material or spiritual) in the broadest sense are structured, and even then, layers or degrees of principle, primary, secondary, etc., within an overall, or overarching, structure:
One:
There is man, in whom God and creation meet.
Two:
Man is composed of body and soul when viewed under the principle of creation as such.
Three:
Man is composed of body, soul and spirit when viewed under the principle of the place man occupies as the with the whole of the created order: body, soul and spirit.
Four:
Man operates under the principle of four - or four modes of operation - the physical (basar); the vital, etheric or blood body (nephesh); astral or psychic body (ruah); and the spiritual body (neshamah). This triune structure was disordered by the fall, allowing the emergence of the discriminating ego (psyche) which should orchestrate the three 'unseen' according to the highest principle (as above, so below) and thus "not my will but thy will be done" (Luke 22:42). The fall was brought about by the inversion "not thy will but my will be done" and so the primordial harmony of the union of nephesh-ruah-neshamah, all of which corresponds to 'wind' or 'breath', was shattered, occluded by the self-serving will (gnome) which brought psyche to the fore.
Five:
The Kaballists' nephesh-ruah-neshamah-hayah (the eternal soul)-yeshidah (the one soul).
Six:
The above plus basar - body.
Seven:
Physical body (basar), etheric body (neshamah), astral body (psyche), lower self (nous), reason (ruah), intellect (pneuma), higher self (neshamah).
There are other systems, eg the chakras, and further layers, eg the nine spiritual hierarchies, the ten Sephiroth, the twelve signs of the zodiac ... and so on.
And each 'school' orders those according to its own operative principles and understandings - and these understanding can themselves be ordered into Mystical, Gnostic, Hermetic (philosophical), Magical and Traditional.
Each higher replicates radiates into the lower, and the lower forms itself accordingly (the tension between esoterism and exoterism) unless a particular school cuts itself off from its higher source, at which point a whole raft of problems ensue as the source is effectively the will (unseen) and psyche (seen) of its founder.
+++
Having said all that:
I suppose I had chalked up the beings people call fae and elementals as nature spirits;
Every existing 'thing' has a 'body' be it gross or subtle, physical or spiritual, by which is is distinct from everything else, so flower faeries, for example, are the spiritual aspects of the material plant - but the 'consciousness' of a flower faerie is equal to that of a plant. If, for example flower faeries actually looked like little people, then the perfect form of a plant would be a little person ... which is nonsense ... so the flower faerie is the subtle or immaterial form of its physical counterpart.
The spirit of a crystal, for example, is its resonance. Science will say crystals resonate because of their intrinsic structure, Hermeticism wiull say a crystal is the solid or material form of the resonance itself. Without a crystalline body, the resonance cannot manifest (or radiate itself) in the material realm.
This does not mean then, that the life of a crystal is lower than the life of an angel, rather it is simpler - it is one thing in itself, whereas angels, and moreso humans, are multiple things in a unity.
Elementals are evven 'lower' than crystals because they are the 'spiritual' forms of pure energies or currents, the material form of which is colour, for example.
Having said that, in their purity as 'raw energy' they are very powerful, but possess no intelligence. exposure to elementals can be dangerous, even fatal, as, like electricity, they overstimulate their corresponding system within the human faculty. Red overstimulates the blood, for example, white the nervous system, yellow the emotions...
Flower faeries posess no more intelligence than a flower. Faeries cannot talk, although some people swear they hear them talking, others will say they hear cryptic messages, laughter, a bubbling brook, a tinkle of bells ... all that is happening is the human imagination is clothing the experience in sensory imagery ... faeries do not look like little people, the essential form of a rose is a rose, not a little person ... but because they interact with humans at a level beyond the sensible, the faculty evokes a sensible (and invariably quasi-human) form.
I've never gotten a very good, solid definition of the astral realm. It seems that all sorts of traditions have their own understandings of what it is and how people get there, and whether or not there are connections between other phenomena, like lucid dreaming and trance, and the astral plane.
Exactly.
I've heard some say it's a realm unto itself,
It is a psychic realm, the realm of the mind/imagination/fantasy.
and others say it's a gateway to a variety of places.
It exists in relation to other domains, eg physical, spiritual, but it is the human who is the nexus. The astral cannot occupy the spiritual, although the spiritual will effect the astral. (As above, so below).
Some say it's thought-forms, others that it is actual spirit-entities. Everyone claims to be basing their definition and beliefs about it on their own personal experiences.
Indeed.
I haven't heard before the idea that all these varied supernatural entities- fae, elementals, succubi/incubi, etc. are all from the same "place," so to speak.
And that was my fault, in this instance, speaking in general terms.
The astral is populated by thought-forms, or egregores. The difference being that egregores are 'artificial' or 'inventions' in that they have no essence, bearing in mind that all essences trace back to one Essence, God, through the Great Chain of Being, or by the action of Divine Plenitude. Egregores are 'unnatural' in the sense that they are not 'real' but manufactured by man (leaving fallen angels aside) by the egoic (self-determining) will, whereas the will aligned to the Divine does not manufacture but radiate the higher - "He who has seen me has seen the Father" - whereas the egoic will says "look at me."
I tend to think there are many universes, and the mythology is an attempt of people to grasp glimpses they've had of other places, not one single place.
Yes, but the immediate difference is whether the mythology is based on reality or an invention. Many people meet TV celebrities and seem unable to distinguish between the actor and the role he plays. Dan Brown's book is utter fantasy, but real for many people.
Having said that, primitive or pagan myth can open onto the Divine, modern myth tends to shut the door. Revelation subsumes eveything below it in the same way that advancing scientific theory covers every aspect of its phenomena. In that sense religion marks an evolutionary or unfolding process.
Second, I'm not sure I understand your definitions of presences vs. essences. Are you saying fae are essences but not presences, and what does that mean? I'm sorry if I'm being dense, but this is new to me and I just am not getting it. As far as I could tell in mythology, fae were personalities, spirit-entities- I would use the term presence for that. I've never been able to tell if what I read in some natural places as "nature spirits" are what others would call fae or not.
In Scripture there is the pool at Bethseda:
"Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep [market] a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches (there's a clue). In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had."
John 5:2-4
Now this I would call an essence, albeit angelic, because its operation is somewhat mechanical, according to its 'certain season' and whoever got to the water first was healed, regardless of how good or bad the person is as a person.
If, however, the angel appeared and spoke, then that would require 'intelligence' or 'presence of mind' on the part of the angel to engage in dialogue - that is what I meant, somewhat inaccurately, by 'presence'.
Put another way, that energy which has no will but does its job is an essence, that energy which has a will of its own - in the sense of a degree of self-dermination and awareness - is a presence (as opposed to the idea that an essence is present because you know it's there).
I wish I never mentioned it, as I was using it in a context I did not explain.
What should be noted here is that apart from humans and angels, nothing 'true' in nature presents itself as a self-determining or self-directing intelligence - at best there is a kind of animal awareness, and thus the possibility of a limited degree of communication, but you can't discuss philosophy with a faerie. This leads us back into the realm of the egregore - the maufactured entity.
+++
"One gives the name egregore to a force generated by a powerful spiritual current and then nourished at regular intervals, according to a rhythm in harmony with the universal life of the cosmos, or to a union of entities united by a common characteristic nature."
Robert Amberlain 'La Kaballe pratigue', Paris, 1951, p175)
'In the Invisible, beyond the physical perception of man, exist artificial beings - generated by devotions, enthusiasms and fanatacisms - that one names egregores.'
"Meditations on the Tarot"
"My name is legion"
The soul is not an egregore, however the body can generate its own egregore in different realms, according to the cognisance and capacity of the will. The lowest form is the as a product of the life of its cells, an etheric egregore, and this is the phantom which resists dissolution after the physical death and which can manifest as a phantom - this phantom has no conscious being as such, but is more akin to an electromagnetic recording which replays itself like a loop tape. The phantom is not to be confused with either the soul, nor the etheric and astral bodies which are the soul's subtle presence in the material realm, and its material presence in the subtle (psychic) realm resectively.
A phantom is the egregore of the body, a ghost is the egregore of the mind, and thus possesses a degree of consciousness, of self-awareness, of its own presence. It is also aware that this presence, like its phantom, is diminishing by the law of entropy, so it seeks to sustain itself by attachment to:
1 - another 'living' egregore, the easier course, but lesser, by virtue of the egregore to which its attaches, which has already begun to damage its creator-host (who is the stronger - who is the master of his habits?) which will seek to defend itself to maintain its own sustenance. (Here lies the realm of the sexual and emotional predator, of possession, of psychic disorder and mental illness, ruined health, suicide - the invasive egregore must bring the occupying egregore down to assert itself - take full possession - of its victim, ie it is a Rumplestilskin, succubus, incubus, vampire ... or a zombie, a dibbuk ... black magic, casting ther runes, curses, etc.)
2 - a pure life, much harder as its innate defences are stronger, but much more rewarding, as the first fruits of its corruption offer the sweetest savour - here lies the sacrifice of virgins, children and the innocent.
The 'power' derived from the sacrifice is not from the victim, but rather the corruption of the practitioner, whose disordered will feeds the egregore, who in turn suckles him, to drive him to greater extremes.
The point is that a 'presence' - any being that possesses the consciousness of 'presence of mind' - is either revealed (from above, is human or angelic), or it is an invention and should be shunned.
Revealed presences are souls, in the material realm, and angels, in the subtle, which are generated from above, by God, and are then revealed, according to His will, within the Cosmos ("According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world" Ephesians 1:4). The angels are actually higher because they are pure act - they exists in the fullness of their being, and are thus closer to God, whereas souls are potentially higher because they are created to be pure act in both the angelic and the material planes - as evidenced by those pure souls who have manifested such phenomena as levitation (St Francis, notably), bilocation (St Pio, most recently), or physical incorruption.
Logismoi, as I mentioned before, are the phantoms of thought; they are the stuff of fantasy and the source of our 'devotions, enthusiams and fanatacisms' - to which they are directed ('you become what you think about') - but they have no essential being, and thus nor do the egregores which they engender - they have no order of reality and for this reason they are classified as 'evil'. The imagination, on the other hand, makes present in the mind an invisible reality in a comprehensible form, in the same way that real art makes present an invisible reality in a sensory form. True art and true imagination are windows into the Infinite.
Egregores are unrestrained. A football mob, a riot, generates an egregore which lasts, then disperses, but people will hang on to the 'thrill' and this is enough to keep the egregore going.
The video industry has generated an egregore of pornography of fantastic proportion, which seeks every to make pornography acceptable, and thus more of it. The web helps in this regard.
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