This reflection is the third in a series that began with the story of an Elder who saved his church using native traditional knowledge, and continued with an honest examination of who taught us to label African traditional wisdom as darkness. Today we go deeper still, into territory that most modern minds dismiss without examination, the world of elemental and nature beings, and why their existence deserves neither fear nor worship, but honest recognition.
Long before the first human beings drew breath, creation was already teeming with life of a kind most of us have never been taught to see. Alongside the visible world of plants, animals, water, and stone, there exists another order of beings, nature beings, whose field of activity is what we simply call nature itself. These are the beings associated with water, air, earth, and fire. They are known in various traditions as elves, gnomes, nixies, salamanders, sylphs and so on. They are not metaphors or fairy tales. They are real inhabitants of creation, servants assigned roles within the vast and intricate machinery of the natural world.
Their work is essential. These elemental beings co-operated creatively in the development of matter itself, and they continue to do so today in its maintenance and further development. They know exactly when and where sudden changes in nature are about to take place. Landslides, volcanic eruptions, the caving in of land undermined by water, floods, earthquakes, the falling of a great tree. They know because they are themselves involved in the preparation and execution of such changes. When danger is imminent, these beings will often attempt to warn any creature approaching the affected spot. An animal senses their presence instinctively. Its hair bristles. It refuses to move forward. Even the best trained animal will disobey its master in such a moment, quite contrary to its usual nature. We observe this behaviour and call it strange. What we are actually witnessing is a creature responding to a warning we ourselves can no longer perceive, because we have, over generations, closed off the finer senses that would allow us to receive it.
These elemental beings have been perceived and named in every culture on earth, and the remarkable thing is not how different those perceptions are, but how similar they turn out to be across peoples and continents who for a long time had no contact with one another.
The Yoruba Sango, deity of thunder and lightning, wielding his double-headed axe as an emblem of justice and worshipped across Nigeria, Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad, maps remarkably closely onto Thor of Norse mythology, the powerful hammer-wielding protector of humanity whose weapon could control lightning and always returned to his hand after being thrown. Two traditions, separated by an ocean and centuries of independent development, perceiving and describing the same elemental force in strikingly similar terms. Similarly, Yemoja, the Yoruba water being perceived as a great maternal presence associated with rivers, oceans, motherhood, purity, and fertility, and typically depicted as a mermaid, finds her counterpart in the water beings of European tradition, the French Melusine and the Merrows of Irish folklore, all of whom are linked to the water element and carry similar qualities of mysterious feminine power. That traditions so geographically distant arrived at such strikingly similar perceptions is not coincidence. It is confirmation that the same order of beings has always been present, waiting to be honestly acknowledged.
When peoples across the globe, without consultation, arrive at similar perceptions of the same beings operating within the same elements, it tells us that what they are perceiving is real, not invented. The African elder who spoke of Sango and the Norse poet who sang of Thor were not fabricating rival mythologies. They were, each in their own language and cultural context, describing the same servants within creation.
And that is precisely the point. These beings are servants, not gods. They operate within creation under the authority of the one Almighty who made all things. They are no more to be worshipped than a river is to be worshipped for quenching our thirst. But they are equally not to be dismissed, feared, or condemned as darkness simply because they are unfamiliar to the modern mind, however educated it may consider itself. Every major tradition on earth, African, European, Asian, and beyond, has perceived their presence and given them names. That alone should humble us before we reach for the word darkness.
The honest recognition that creation is far more populated, far more ordered, and far more purposefully structured than our modern education has taught us is not superstition. It is the beginning of a deeper and more truthful understanding of the world in which we dwell. These beings were always here, long before we arrived, and they continue their quiet, faithful service within creation even today whether we acknowledge them or not.
Perhaps it is time we did.
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