Elementals & Elementaries: various types of spirits

Continuing my series on H.P. Blavatsky’s writings I come upon a theme that is constant in Blavatsky’s writings and is still relevant today. The basic question Blavatsky answers here is: what kind of spirits are mediums (or channelers) likely to be talking to? In her day spiritualists claimed to be talking mainly to the spirits of the dead. This is still what mediums like Char claim in the 21st century.

Blavatsky said to that: this is not very likely. The spirits of the dead don’t come back to talk to us. They pass on to heaven (she called it devachan) – and only communicate with us through dreams. Don’t seek them out, their time on earth is passed.

What does come back to us is what she calls ‘elementariesdisembodied, vicious, and earth-bound, yet human spirits (H.P. Blavatsky 1877). In other words: the worst aspects of our dead beloved may speak through mediums like Char. Unless of course what she’s doing is fooling people or clairvoyantly reading their aura’s. These are also time honoured explanations of what happens when you set someone who claims to be a medium in the position where they are expected to tell you about your loved ones.

The other types of beings Blavatsky wanted to make clear exists is one that hasn’t been popularized all that much: the elementals. These nature spirits have since been explained to help parks be healthy, govern plants individually, inhabit ponds and lakes, mountains etc. They have in fact been portrayed quite lovingly in some episodes of ‘Charmed’ (the television series). I believe it’s probably accurate to say the form they are observed to have is one more caused by the consciousness of the human doing the observing.

When a plant actually starts blooming for the first time in years after a human being explained that the people who own the place will remove (i.e. kill) it if it doesn’t get flowers soon, that surely means some kind of consciousness inhabits the plant. This is the sort of stuff that happens on theosophical estates. Findhorn was merely a extravagant example. Jiddu Krishnamurti has also been known to do this.