The next group of 'very useful' elemental beings we will consider are the undines, nymphs, or nixies.

To sum up what we have said about the undines so far: undines are detachments from the hierarchy of the Archangels. The etheric body of the undines consists of chemical ether. Their consciousness lives in the flowing of the fluid element. They are enchanted in all fluid forms in the earthly realm. They are the world chemists, without whose activity no kind of transfor­mation of substance would be possible. They are re­lated to human feeling. Additional indications about the undines by Rudolf Steiner follow. "Undines carry the action of chemical ether into the plants...The inner nature of the undines is different from that of the gnomes. They cannot direct themselves to the weaving and working of the whole cosmos in the airy watery element, therefore they are not as alert as the gnomes. The undines are dreaming continually, and this dream is their own form at the same time. They do not hate the earth as much as the gnomes do, but they are sensitive to earthly things. They live in the etheric element of water, they swim and float through it, and they are very sensitive to fish life, for the fish­form threatens them; they sometimes take on a fish form, but they quickly abandon it for another form. They dream their own existence. And as they dream their own existence, they loosen and separate and bind the substances in the air, which they bring into the leaves in a mysterious way; they bring it to what the gnomes have pushed up from below. The gnomes thrust the plant entities upward. They would wither above ground if the undines didn’t approach them from all sides and prove themselves to be world chemists with this dreamy consciousness in which they buzz around the plants. Undines dream the com­bining and separating of substances. And this dream in which the plants live, this undine dream into which the plants grow when they grow upwards from the ground, this is the world chemist that brings about the mysterious combining and separating of substances in the plant world, proceeding from the leaves. So we can say that the undines are the chemists of plant life. They dream of chemistry.

The undines have an extremely delicate spiritual­ity, a spirituality which is in its element wherever water and air come together. Undines live entirely in the moist element, but they become especially active at the surface of drops or other bodies of water. They are always trying to protect themselves from getting a permanent fish form. They want to keep on metamor­phosing from one form to another. But through this ability to metamorphose, in which they dream about the stars and the sun and the light and the warmth, they become the chemists who develop the forms of the plants starting with the leaves, after the power of the gnomes has pushed them out of the ground. This is the way the plants develop their leaf growth, and the secret of this growth is seen to be connected with the undine-dream into which the plant grows."

ln the following lecture of this cycle, Rudolf Stei­ner tells us that a different side of the undines can be discovered through an awakened sleep conscious ness. "Awakened sleep consciousness has for its con­tent a wonderful world of fluids which surge up in every possible way in response to the metamorphosis of the undines. Awakened night consciousness per­ceives this ever-changing ocean of beings which rise and fall like waves, just as day-consciousness per­ceives beings with firm contours. Man is always sur­rounded by a sea of living undines during deep sleep."

In the next lecture of this cycle, we read: "Undines do not have the same desire to live that man has, and that also animals have more instinctively. But one could almost say that undines and sylphs have a need for death. Cosmically they are like gnats which throw themselves into a fire. They feel that they only really have life when they die. This is very interesting. All the creatures in the physical world want to live, and one esteems everything that has the force of life in it. One esteems everything that is alive and sprouting and growing. But if we cross over to the other side, all the beings tell us that dying is really the beginning of life. They can feel that this is true." As mentioned before, the undines have a great longing to offer themselves to the higher hierarchies as food. "They continue to live and they go into their eternity, as it were. Every year there is a continual streaming out of these beings, whose inner nature is formed out of the earth; they stream out and want to offer themselves to higher beings as food."

As mentioned earlier, these 'detachments' from hierarchical beings return to the latter after they have undergone a certain development through countless enchantments and releases.

Rudolf Steiner described the undines' places of action as follows. "If you could observe certain places, such as springs, where there are stones down below with moss growing on them, and a kind of wall forms between the plants and rocks, and then the water trickles over this-that is also necessary-you would see that what one calls nymphs or undines is something very real. One can see this there particularly well.

"The beings one can call undines exist where plants and minerals come together. They are bound to the element of water, and they become incarnated where water, plants and rocks touch one another.

Rudolf Steiner gives us another viewpoint for an understanding of undines in the following. "We can only describe a second class of elemental beings...if we use the word metamorphosis... They are beings which are changing their shape every moment; and when we meet them and think that we have grasped them, they have already become something else, so that we can only follow them if we make our souls mobile and re­ceptive...If on a day when the weather conditions are changing even moment; when for example clouds form and rain falls from them, and fog rises up from the earth's surface, if on such a day one devotes one­self to these phenomena in the way I described earlier, so that one allows a moral impression to replace the physical one: one can again have a particular experience. This is particularly clear if one watches the play of water at a waterfall which is giving off spray. If one devotes oneself to the forming and dispersing of mist and to the vapors which fill the air and rise like smoke, or if one sees a fine rain streaming down, or feels a slight drizzle going through the air-if we feel all this in a moral way, the second class of beings (un­dines} appears, to which we can apply the term meta­morphosis or transformation. One cannot draw this second group of beings any more than one can really paint lightning. One can only catch a particular in­stant, for in the next instant everything has changed. Thus the second class of elemental beings consists of entities which are continually changing, and they are best symbolized by fleeting cloud formations. But oc­cultists can also become acquainted with these beings in another way. If we watch the plants as they come out of the ground in the spring, and before they are ready to bear fruit, occult vision feels that the same be­ings it discovered in the interweaving and gathering mists, also play around the plant-budding beings. So we can say that when one sees plants sprouting out of the earth, one also sees them bathed in such metamor­phosing, elemental beings. And the occult gaze then feels as if that which weaves and hovers invisibly above the plant buds had something to do with what makes plants come up out of the ground. Conven­tional science only recognizes the growth of plants; it only knows that plants have forces that drive them upward. But the occultist knows that there is some­thing else around the blossoms. Let's assume that we have a young plant before us. The occultist perceives metamorphosing beings around the shoot of the young plant which have, as it were, been released from the environment and which press downward; they do not, as does the physical growth principle, only go from below upward, but they are above and they draw the plant out of the ground. When the earth becomes covered with green in the spring, the occult­ist feels something like nature forces descending from the cosmos, which draw out what is in the ground so the inside of the earth catches a sight of the heavens and the surrounding world. There is a mobile element above the plant; and the occultist acquires a feeling for the fact that what weaves around the plant is the same force that is present in vaporizing and re-precipitating water. This is the second class of beings and forces of nature.

Here’s another description of undines. "When we come to the fluid element; the elemental beings in it have concentrated on the development of what man has in his feelings. Compared with these beings, we humans are really backward in this respect. We may be pleased by a red rose, and we have a certain feeling when the leaves on the trees rustle in the wind. But these beings are able to accompany the rose saps which rise up to the rose blossom. There they experi­ence the red of the blossom. They feel the processes of the world in a much more intimate way than we do. We remain outside of things with our feelings, but they live in the midst of events and participate in them."

"And when we come to fluids, we find a different kind of spiritual beings. Whereas with our intellect we are like the elemental beings in solids, in our feeling, we are more like the elemental beings which live in fluids. Our feelings remain outside of things; the beautiful tree is out there, and I'm standing here, I am separated from it; I permit its characteristics to flow into me. The elemental beings in the fluids stream through the tree in its sap; they and their feelings stream into every leaf. They not only perceive red and blue from outside, they experience these colors in­wardly; they experience sensation inside the things. Thereby, these spiritual beings have a much more in­tense feeling life, just as the gnomes in solids have a very intense intellectual life."

 (Quote from ‘World Ether beings kingdoms of nature’ compiled by Ernst Hageman from Rudolf Steiner’s Spiritual science)