Whose Name Was Writ in Water
True it is that, being composed of the purest parts of the elements wherein they dwell, and having no contrary qualities, they can live for several centuries; yet are they much troubled because of their mortal nature. It was, however, revealed to the philosophers that an elementary spirit could attain to immortality by being united in marriage with a human being. The children born of such unions are more noble and heroic than the children of human men and women, and some of the greatest figures of antiquity—Zoroaster, Alexander, Hercules, Merlin, to mention a few—are declared to have been the children of elementary spirits.
—Lewis Spence, An Encyclopedia of Occultism
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
—John Keats, self-composed epitaph
Dee was a gifted child, with a remarkable memory, and was able to work out complex mathematical problems in his head. Although the son of a servant, he obviously deserved to be educated.
—Damon Wilson, The Queen’s Astrologer, the Rogue Necromancer, and the Angel of Light
Ah, the elementals of lore. From time immemorial, if you believe some folks, they have been smarter than us, possessed of powers we cannot comprehend… and yet envious of our immortal souls, which will exist as long as time itself, while they are doomed to eventual death from which there is no continuance. In the Quran, the arch-fiend Iblis, king of the Efreet, refuses to follow the will of Allah and bow down before Adam. Why should the Son of Fire kneel to the Son of Clay? he asks, and for this, is doomed to the pit. Yet most of the elementals apparently submitted quite gracefully to the dominion of Adam, according to Abbé de Villars, anyway.
The Abbé himself was one of those oversized figures who seems to know a lot more than can be explained by simple erudition. His great work on the subject of the elementals, Comte de Gabalis, is a disguised philosophical treatise telling of a dialogue between a mysterious wandering Count, who reveals the secrets of the elemental courts. It is told in novel format, but in great degree it is really a satirical refutation of the writings of La Calprenade (unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get into that, or we’d be here all week) and by the 1670’s was widely read in both France and England, and it managed to get the Abbé, a churchman and preacher in the faith of Rome, in serious hot water with the Pope, who was his boss after all. Despite persecution from his former brothers in Christ, the Abbé kept on writing, producing the Traité de la délicatesse before he was assassinated on the road to Lyons in 1673. While he was not the first ‘enemy’ of the church to be so removed, his death apparently did little to slow down his literary output: L’Amour sans faibless, Anne de Bretagne et Ailmanzaris, and Critique de la Bérénice de Racine et de Corneille were all published after he died (whether or not he actually wrote them before he died or they were written posthumously by some admirer… or perhaps another explanation… is as yet undetermined, although most people accept that the Abbé did write them) and in 1715, some forty-five years after he died, Nouveaux Entretiens sur les sciences secrètes was published, supposedly written by the Abbé, as a sequel to Comte de Gabalis. How this dead man kept writing books must be passed over for now, for there is the matter of that first book to contend with.
In Comte de Gabalis we learn that before the Fall of Adam, the first man had absolute sovereignty over the four kinds of elementals, fire, air, earth and water, on account of his having been formed from the pure admixture of all four himself. (So presumably, when Iblis called Adam the son of clay, he was deliberately ignoring both the inspiration of elemental air and the spark of elemental fire that would be required, along with the earth and water that would make said clay. This divides spirit into fire and air, and matter into earth and water, in the divine scheme of things.) Once Adam fell, and was no longer pure, he could no longer command such elementals… until his descendants discovered the proper incantations, which could restore the bonds of fealty between man and elemental, a rather feudal way of looking at the relationship. Yet the Comte hints at another reason the elementals are so eager to follow the commands of mere humans; for while human flesh is frail, and dies easily and young compared to the stuff of the elementals, our spirits are immortal, while theirs are doomed to slow dissolution. Only by uniting with a mortal may the elemental spirits gain spiritual immortality, and thus live forever.
