The light is the efficient agent of forms and life, because it is both motion and heat. When fixed and polarised about a centre, it produces a living being and draws thereafter the plastic substance needed to perfect and preserve it. This plastic substance is, in the last analysis, formed of earth and water and, with good reason, is denominated slime of the earth in the Bible. But this light is in nowise spirit, as believed by the Indian hierophants and all schools of Göetia: it is only the spirit’s instrument. Nor is it the body of the _protoplastes_, though so regarded by theurgists of the school of Alexandria. It is the first physical manifestation of the Divine Breath. God creates it eternally and man, who is in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply it.[80] Prometheus, says the classical fable, having stolen fire from heaven, gave life thereby to images formed of earth and water, for which crime he was blasted and chained by Jupiter. Elementary spirits, say the Kabalists in their most secret books, are children of the solitude of Adam, born of his dreams when he yearned for the woman who as yet had not been given to him by God.[81] According to Paracelsus, the blood lost at certain regular periods by the female sex and the nocturnal emissions to which male celibates are subject in dream people the air with phantoms.[82] The hypothetical origin of _larvæ_, according to the masters, is here indicated with sufficient clearness and further explanation may be spared. Such _larvæ_ have an aerial body formed from vapour of blood, for which reason they are attracted towards spilt blood and in older days drew nourishment from the smoke of sacrifices. They are those monstrous offspring of nightmare which used to be called _incubi_ and _succubi_. When sufficiently condensed to be visible, they are as a vapour tinged by the reflection of an image; they have no personal life, but they mimic that of the magus who evokes them, as the shadow images the body. They collect above all about idiots and those immoral creatures whose isolation abandons them to irregular habits. The cohesion of parts being very slight in their fantastic bodies, they fear the open air, a great fire and above all the point of a sword. They become, in a manner, as vapourous appendages to the real bodies of their parents, since they live only by drawing on the life either of those who have created them or those who appropriate them by their evocation. It may come about in this manner that if these shadows of bodies be wounded, their parent may be maimed in real earnest, even as the unborn child may be hurt and disfigured by the imaginations of its mother. The world is full of such phenomena; they justify these strange revelations and can only be explained thereby.