By Olusola Adeyegbe
This is the fourth reflection in a series that began with the story of an Elder who saved his church and lost his membership, continued with an honest examination of who taught us to call African traditional wisdom darkness, and deepened further into the world of elemental and nature beings and how every culture on earth has perceived and named them. Today we arrive at what all three previous essays were quietly moving toward: the question of how we as human beings ought to relate to these beings, and the sobering recognition that we have largely lost the connection that once made that relationship natural, living, and real.
There was a time when this connection was natural and unquestioned. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe lived in conscious relationship with the substantiate beings, great and small. Many of them could see beyond the visible world of matter into the realm where these beings operate, and they experienced them directly, with a clarity that left no room for doubt about their existence or their ceaseless activity in creation. This was not primitive superstition. It was real knowledge, held with reverential awe and childlike confidence, and it was among the most sacred things those peoples carried.
It was also, as we explored in our second essay, systematically destroyed. When Boniface attacked the sacred shrine of the Teutons, he did not correct a false belief. He demolished a true one out of ignorance. What he should have done was confirm the truth of their knowledge and then lead them onward with explanations to higher recognitions. Instead, by declaring Wotan and the other substantiate beings non-existent, he severed a connection those peoples had cultivated over generations. These beings are not gods, but they do exist through the Power of God and work actively in creation. Denying their existence did not make them disappear. It simply made human beings blind to what was still there.
The same pattern played out across Africa, as we noted in our earlier reflections. The same ignorance. The same arrogance of the missionary enterprise. The same destruction of genuine knowledge in the name of a faith that itself lacked the deeper understanding of creation it presumed to teach.
But let us move from history to the question that matters most for us today. How ought we to relate to these beings now?
The answer charts a path between two errors that human beings have consistently fallen into. The first error is worship, treating these beings as divine powers to be propitiated, feared, or petitioned as though they were gods. The second error is dismissal, the modern mind’s reflexive contempt for anything it cannot weigh or measure, labelling the entire subject as myth, superstition, or the residue of primitive thinking. Both errors sever the connection. Both leave us poorer for it.
The right posture is something altogether different. It is recognition, gratitude, and a willingness to learn. The Grail Message of Abd-ru-shin, from which much of my understanding on this subject flows, states it with clarity: we must not look upon the great substantiate beings as gods, for they are not gods but faithful servants of the Almighty, great in their serving. Equally, we must not look down upon the smaller elemental beings in arrogance, as though they exist for our convenience. They do not serve us. They serve only the Creator. It is we who must approach them, not the other way around.
There is a quiet but profound teaching in that. These beings have never deviated from their purpose. They have never abandoned their post. They tend the elements of creation with a constancy and devotion that puts human inconsistency to shame. In their faithful service, they model something we would do well to study and emulate.
And they are not distant or abstract. They are active in the very elements we interact with every day. The water we drink. The air we breathe. The earth beneath our feet. The fire that warms and powers our lives. Every time we engage with the natural world, we are moving within their field of activity whether we know it or not. A deeper understanding of their work is therefore not an esoteric luxury reserved for mystics and scholars. It is practical wisdom that could fundamentally change how we relate to the natural world around us, and how responsibly we use the gifts it continually offers.
There is also a consequence to ignoring this connection that deserves to be stated plainly. When the link with these substantiate helpers is eliminated, a great gap is torn that harms us. And when we look at the state of the natural world today, the environmental degradation, the plastic pollution, the destruction of ecosystems, the climate instability, it is worth asking seriously whether part of what we are witnessing is the consequence of that torn gap. A humanity that no longer recognises the beings who tend creation will inevitably treat creation carelessly. How could it be otherwise?
The path forward is not a return to the worship of nature beings. It is something more mature and more demanding than that. It is the cultivation of conscious, grateful, and humble awareness of the order of creation in which we dwell. In practical terms, this means learning to acknowledge these beings and their ceaseless activity with quiet thankfulness, even when we cannot see them with our physical eyes. When rain falls and replenishes the earth, when a river runs clear, when the wind shifts and the air freshens, these are not merely natural events happening of their own accord. They are the work of faithful servants going about their purpose. To move through the natural world with that awareness, to receive its gifts with genuine gratitude rather than casual entitlement, is already the beginning of restored connection.
The beings were always here. The connection was always real. But somewhere along the way, as the intellect rose to dominance over the spirit, ignorance and arrogance followed, and with them came the systematic destruction of ancestral knowledge that had taken generations to accumulate. The connection was severed. And what made the severance so costly was that we lost even the willingness to acknowledge that anything had been lost.
It is time to find that willingness again, and through it, to reconnect meaningfully with the substantiate beings who have never once abandoned their post in creation.
