Nature Spirits
Selected lectures by Rudolf Steiner
on the nature and activities of elemental beings

Nature Spirits (or Elemental Beings) were perceived by members of all ancient cultures and were felt to be the active agents behind all natural phenomena. This now long gone instinctive perceptual faculty was essential to their survival and their way of life as it was through an imaginative understanding of the activities and relationships of these entities that they could work with what we call “the forces of nature.” These spirits  became known as fairies and gnomes in later times, and have become immortalised in myth, legend and stories for children.

In these selected lectures, Rudolf Steiner gives descriptions of just some from the tremendous variety of these elemental creature-beings and how they are still intimately involved with everything we do, though they are just outside our present-day perception. In our time, he states, the instinctive understanding that humankind once had for these elemental beings must be transformed into a clear scientific knowledge. Without developing this new relationship to these beings, humanity will not be able to bridge the gulf that separates it from the spiritual world. For the nature spirits can be of great assistance to us in this goal, acting as ‘emissaries of higher divine spiritual beings’.