Elemental Cities

We have already spoken that in the unstable, mutable and fluctuating space of the Interworld the only “islands” of stability are the so-called Elemental “cities“, or “towers“, formed there as subspaces of “condensed reality.” The experience of scrying in the Interspace, accumulated by practitioners of the traditional Schools and Orders, shows that there are many such “cities” in the Interworld; nevertheless, for humans and other beings of our world-system four are accessible — Phinias, Murias, Gorias and Falias, corresponding to the “four-element” structure of the cosmos as we know it.

In fact, each of the “cities” is a distinct “private world,” a quasi-universe whose overall dimensions are indeterminate and correspond to the extent of “physical” reality. Nevertheless, because the space of each “city” is homogeneous, movement through it takes place without hindrance, resistance or difficulty, and thus any “distances” are overcome instantly.

Since the Interworld has a “sixfold” structure, the space of each “city” can be represented as an octahedron, a square bipyramid, with a maximum spatial cohesion and stability on the inner plane and a gradual decline in stability toward the poles.

At the same time, as we have already noted, the structural “basis,” the “polis,” of each “city” is constituted by the corresponding “element” — that is, an environment possessing a single dominant property: horizontal mobility (“air“, Gorias), vertical mobility (“fire“, Phinias), plasticity (“water“, Murias) and inertia (“earth“, Falias), formed and enlivened by the corresponding form of consciousness — the “sylphs,” “salamanders,” “undines” and “gnomes.” In turn, the materiality of each of the “cities” also has four properties corresponding to a tetragrammatical structure and is sometimes mistakenly equated with the “representatives” of other elements within it (people speak, for example, of the “fire of fire,” “water of fire,” “air of fire” and “earth of fire,” which is only true with significant qualifications, since in each element the properties of others are absent, but each has its own manifestations of the tetragrammatical law).

Thus, in each city one can find a particular kind of potential difference, a vertical polarity, a “penetrative power” (conditionally corresponding to plasticity), its own mobility and its own resistance. For example, in Gorias this is the pressure differential that moves the air, its capacity for diffusion, mobility and viscosity, and correspondingly four “quarters” of sylphs, the four “winds” — Not, Zephyr, Evr and Boreas. In the center of each quarter, alongside the elementals, there are tetragrammatical, or as they are now commonly called, “kerubic” beings, similar to Epiklets, described both in Dee-Kelley’s “Vision” and in grimoire literature.

“Above” and “below” the elemental basis of each “city” are the “choroi“, also inhabited by Epiklets and by the “wandering spirits” that have settled there (grigori and elementaries). Each “chora“, depending on how its inhabitants are sustained, has two variants — Benevolent and Malevolent — positioned as mirror images with respect to the plane of the polis.

Moreover, at different levels of the polis and chora there are relatively autonomous subspaces inhabited by fairies and elementers, in each of which one can also encounter epiklets, grigori and elementaries.

At the apexes of the octahedral space of the “city” sits a tetrad of governing beings: the God of the element, the Archon, the Ref and the Angel (below — the demon), representing the corresponding tetragrammatical first principles of that element. Crowning the “city” is the Elemental logos, which constitutes the system-forming core of each space.

Because the space of the elemental “cities” offers no resistance to movement within them, their study may be of great value not only as an independent branch of “metageography” but also as an aid to the study of manifested spaces as such, since the principles that form the “mixed” space of worlds are the same as those of the “distilled” systems of the “cities,” and therefore the regularities observed for a “city” largely apply to a “world” as well. It is hoped that research into these spaces will expand, not only through the “semantic” approaches of Enochian Magic, but also by means of scrying and exteriorization, and that this will one day lead to the creation of detailed maps of the spaces that everyone will have to pass through at least once — in the postmortem journey.