7 Air and Its Influence

Chapter outline

Air is the second principle and the receptive vessel of heaven’s soul and life.

It joins celestial influence to watery and earthly outflows.

Mediation permits the changing elements to generate the common seed.

Fixation and volatilization alter properties while preserving one first matter.

Air serves as a generative organ of the macrocosm, continually producing renewed Chaos.

Air is the second principle after the separation of the great Chaos. Together with heaven it is the smith and father, the male and first agent, the male seed and first worker of all things. Heaven is soul and life; air is spirit and the receptacle of soul and life, and thus the vital spirit of the macrocosm. Air is a subtle water-vapour, a water turned into its opposite state, and a thicker and somewhat coarser vapour than heaven. Its thickness therefore captures heaven’s subtle influence and fixes it within itself, changing it into an airy nature and substance. It also receives the lower, still thicker watery and earthly vapours as its like by reason of their origin. It coagulates them with itself and heaven and, through constant movement and circulation, brings them into unity. Finally it thickens through the unceasing arrival of vapours from above and below and resolves into dew, rain, snow and frost. These meteors fall by their own weight onto our water and land, to be worked on there again. Air is thus the first intermediate for uniting heaven with water and earth. Without it, heaven could not agree with water and earth. It is the first to associate, link and unite the whole celestial influx with the lower watery and earthly outflows, forging in its sphere the beginning of the common seed of all things.

As stated above, one vapour readily mixes with another, one water with another, and one earth with another. But an earth does not readily capture a vapour or mix with a subtle vapour. Even if it retains a small portion, the most fixed, most of it nevertheless flies off again. Conversely, when vapour becomes water, the thicker the water is, the better it mixes with earth. Through continual thickening it becomes earth, just as earth, through increasing subtilization by means of water and air, is changed into water and air. Nature therefore operates through intermediates or middle ways, not immediately from one extreme to the other; otherwise the result would be a substitution of the wrong thing for the right. Earth and water must become smoke and vapour, as we see every day, just as heaven and air already are. They then come together, like with like, and through their action form a seed. This resolves into dew and rain and falls upon water and earth as the centre and receptacle of all celestial virtues. From it all animals, plants and minerals are generated, corrupted and regenerated. As Maria the Prophetess says: one smoke or vapour captures and fixes another; air fixes heaven; heaven together with air fixes water still further; water receives or fixes earth together with air and heaven still further, ultimately into stone and metal.

Thus heaven becomes earthly and becomes earth: bodily, visible, tangible and capable of being handled. Conversely, water dissolves earth; air dissolves water, or subtilizes water and earth into vapour and smoke; air together with water and earth dissolves and subtilizes heaven and changes it into its own nature. One is thus transformed into another, now fixed, now volatile, in unceasing alternation. Heaven becomes earth, air water, earth heaven, and water air. Once again this is called Homer’s Golden Chain, Plato’s Ring, the Above and Below of Hermes: what is above is like what is below, and what is below like what is above. As stated, there is no difference in the matter; every difference is accidental, a difference of properties. Earth is fixed heaven; heaven is volatile earth; air is rarefied or thinned water; water is condensed or thickened air. We see that one differs from another only in being volatile or fixed, fluid or dissolved, thick or coagulated. When the volatile is made fixed and the fixed volatile, when the coagulated is dissolved and the dissolved coagulated, one has been changed into the other. Yet it remains what it was before: first matter.

Finally, air may rightly be called the kidneys, or testes, of the macrocosm, because it is chiefly within air that all the substantial radical humours of the macrocosm flow together, and the extract of the whole universe gathers there. There the ancient Chaos, separated for so many years and ages, is generated anew and regenerated every day and every hour, for the generation, preservation, destruction and regeneration of all natural things. For what are dew and rain, as will be explained further, but simply regenerated Chaos, from which all animals obtain life and sustenance? All plants and minerals spring and grow from it, and all this is generated and hatched within air. Enough has been said of this for now; it will become increasingly clear below.