On the Material Cause of Meteors.

When the one and supreme Divinity had thought within Himself concerning creation, He reflected into Himself and contracted His heat, so that it did not yet shine upon the world. Thus, the Father is associated with the Darkness, the Son with the shining Light, and the Holy Spirit with the universal spirit proceeding from them both. The Father spoke in the darkness, and by speaking, the bright Word shone forth out of the darkness; by emitting His rays, He revealed the Spirit, which is the glue and the bond between Father and Son, between darkness and light, and between body and soul. The Father reigns forever and ever in the Empyrean heaven, surrounded by fire and hedged in on all sides by assisting and ministering angels. The Son established the heavens, imposed order upon the stars, and finally "set His tabernacle in the sun." And to the Spirit proceeding from both is ascribed this fluctuating air found in the sublunary region The "sublunary region" refers to the area below the moon, which in ancient cosmology was the realm of change, decay, and the four elements., at whose command the spirits—both good and evil inhabiting it—are moved and disposed toward either a blessing or a curse. For thus, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were established, and all their power by the spirit from His mouth. Psalm 33. The place or seat of all these machines of the world is the air, or universal spirit, which embraces both the heavens and the stars as well as the earth in its grasp. Saint Peter understands this spirit—which is prone to moisture—when he says, The heaven and the earth were of old, consisting of waters and through waters by the word of GOD, 2 Peter 3. Here he denotes that not only the substance of heaven (which is invisible) but also that of thick water and the opaque earth itself are "of water and from water." That this water was invisible, and consequently air and purely spiritual, is indicated by the passage previously cited from Hebrews 11, from which it follows that the visible earth and waters were formerly from the invisible air or universal spirit.

The difference, however, that is created in this simple and uniform universal aerial sea—both in heaven and in the sublunary place—does not arise from the nature of the air itself, but from the disposition of the Sphere or Orb. This sphere also receives its nature from the disposition of the Angel presiding over it; just as the sphere of Saturn received its cold and dry temperament from the spirit Zaphkiel, Mars its fiery heat and dryness from Samael, the Sun its life-giving heat from Michael, and the Moon its watery coldness from Gabriel, etc. Indeed, these Angels receive these properties of theirs directly from the SephirotThe Sephirot are the ten attributes or emanations in Jewish Kabbalah through which the Infinite (Ein Sof) reveals Himself., or the Holy Numerations of God—that is, the gates of light—as will be demonstrated more copiously below. Similarly, the regions of the sublunary elements receive their differences from the various dispositions of the spirits presiding over them, with which the spirits of the winds also seem to agree, as has been more clearly explained in the description of the supernatural causes that produce meteorsIn early modern science, "meteors" included all atmospheric phenomena: rain, wind, lightning, and clouds, not just falling stars..

Finally, the place that Philosophers attribute to the air is that middle substance of the world-spirit that lies between earth and fire. Although, as has been said, the entire substance of the air is single and simple in its pure and sheer disposition, nevertheless, the portion of this sublunary world-spirit is thicker at its base because of the coldness of the terrestrial shadows, so that it appears to be visible water. At its summit, however, it is observed to be very subtle and thin, regarding the hot condition that the highest element has from the Angel presiding over it. And yet, the entire portion of that spirit, from the center of the earth all the way to the summit of the periphery, does not differ in its simplicity naturally and by itself; but by the power and will of the divine Word, it is daily altered in quality in a seemingly accidental way. For at the moment of creation, due to the conflict between light and darkness, it was fit to participate both in the slow and dull action of the coldness of darkness and in the swift and agile action of the heat of light. For the shapeless and dark mass of the abyss original: "abyssi congeries", contracted and frozen by privative cold, was dissolved by the action of that same heat immediately after the emission of divine light and reduced into the invisible moist form of waters. Although this appears damp, fluid, and mobile because of the dissolution of the dry and frozen, it nevertheless received that mobility and fluidity from the action of heat, just as it received that moisture from the action of cold. Therefore, if the air suffers the action of extreme heat, it will have the least sign of coldness and, consequently, of moisture, but a greater sign of dryness, and thus it approaches the nature of fire, which is also called the fiery element. Similarly, the more coldness predominates, the less commerce the spirit will have with heat; consequently, it will be thicker, reduced into visible water, and closer to the dryness of the earth, and thus less moist. Where the coldness of the earth (or darkness) and the intensity are [balanced], it is moist, and this occurs around the middle region of the air. From there, the more one recedes from fire toward the earth, the more dense the spirit is and more subject to the senses, and vice versa. And this is the natural disposition of this spirit in creation, which it received from the influx of the first three Sephirotic numerations. Although this spirit is simple in and of itself and, as it were, potential, it is nevertheless like wax, fit to receive the disposition of any quality or impression according to the divine will and ordination, which the angels (as the ministers of GOD, performing His word) execute in the form of winds and burning fire, as the holy scriptures testify. Therefore, we think it may be said not inaptly that the air, or world-spirit, intermediate between light and darkness, is neutral in its nature, standing as it were in the middle between either extreme; but according to the divine will, it sometimes adheres more to this or that through the mediation of angels. They lead its nature in manifold ways to produce a meteor of this or that kind, and this either for a curse—from which diseases follow and the spirits of corruption predominate—or for a blessing, and such are the authors or proximate causes of the fertility of plants and the health of animals, as the testi-