Originally published February 2, 2014.

How Water (Oceans) Came To Be On the Second Day according to Rudolph Steiner, early 20th century Christian mystic and father of biodynamic farming:

The first thing which then happened was that the element of light broke into all this; and out of the psychic or spiritual activity which I have described as cosmic musing there then came to pass a separation of gaseous from fluid. I will ask you to hold very clearly in your minds this moment which followed the coming into being of light. In dry prose, what happened was this: after the light had penetrated into the tohu wabohu, the Elohim caused what had once before in the past been the gaseous element to separate from what in the same way had been the watery element, so that it was again possible to differentiate between the gaseous and the watery. Thus in the chaotic mass compounded of the three elementary states, a separation came about, but in such a way that elements of two different natures emerged — one of the nature of air, with a tendency to expand in all directions, the other of the nature of water, with the tendency to cohere. But the two were not yet in a condition comparable to the air or water of today. The “water” was very much denser — we shall presently see why this was so. On the other hand, to get an idea of the constitution of “air” at that time, we cannot do better than look up from the earth to where, in the region of air, the water turns to vaporous formations, and has the tendency to rise into clouds, only to fall again later as rain. Thus the one element was an ascending, the other a descending one. There was a quality of water in both of them, but the one kind of water had the tendency to become vaporous, to rise upward as cloud, and the other the tendency to pour downward and assume a level surface. Of course, that is only a comparison, for what I have been describing took place in the elementary world

Through their cosmic musing the Elohim brought it about that a separation took place in thetohu wabohu between two elementary conditions. The one had the tendency to press upward, to become vapour; that is, the watery transforming itself to the gaseous; the other had the tendency to discharge itself downward; that is, the watery condensing and cohering. That is the course of events which is expressed in modern languages in words somewhat like this: “The Gods made a something between the waters above and the waters below.” I have just described to you what the Elohim did. Within the “waters” they brought it about that one element had the tendency to spread outwards, to expand, the other to contract towards a centre. The something between is nothing tangible, it is just a way of saying that a separation has been brought about between the two forms of energy which I have just described. You could also put it this way, that the Elohim so acted on the waters that on the one side they took an upward direction, showed a tendency to cloud-formation, a tendency to stream out into space; on the other side they showed a tendency to accumulate upon the surface of the earth. The “partition” was really more like a notional one, and the word in Genesis which expresses this process of separation must be so understood. You know that the Vulgate uses the word “firmament” [ 1 ] for this. The Hebrew word is rakia. [ 2 ] This word means something which should not be interpreted in a phenomenal sense — it simply means the separation of two directions of force.

With that we have reached what is described in Genesis as the second “day”; and if we want to put it into our own words, we should have to say, “within the vortex of elementary states the Elohim first separated the airy from the fluid nature.” That is a quite exact rendering of what is meant; the Elohim separated what tends to become air, which of course includes watery vapour, from what tends to contract and become denser. That is the second “day” of creation.

Happy Sunday.

Pacifica by Knox Bronson (full-screen viewing recommended)

I know, shameless self-promotion, but this is the first full piece of music I have written since I launched P1xels in December of 2009. Please click on the link & buy it! Support independent artists please!

I did write one lovely piece, wait, two pieces for Maia around that time, now that I think about it: one for Christmas (Maia Dream 817: Koi Flashing – i invite you to listen to it & of course buy it as well; and one for her birthday (Maia, It’s You), which I have not recorded for public release yet. I have arranged a couple of songs since then, including “Baby’s No Help,” which I wrote in the fall of 2009.

Unfortunately, the hard-drive with that arrangement and all the files (and the old P1xels site as well) died when we were rebuilding the P1xels one post at a time, 22K of them. Luckily, the site was still on the server so we could re-download it, but I’m not sure if I will be able to recover “Baby’s No Help” and a few other pieces that were on there.

All this to say, I am very happy to be making/writing music again. And I hope you enjoy the video and the music.

(Update, December 25, 2015: Please download Pacifica as a free gift between now and New Years at Bandcamp. When prompted, enter 0 as the amount you wish to pay for the song.)

Merry Christmas, everybody!