The real earth is Gaia, the subjective matrix of the Universe. Our planet is Gaia’s emanation on the illusive plane of the most material world in the universe of being. The present creation, when the Earth was lifted out of the water by Brahma in the shape of a boar, is one of two great creations mentioned in the Puranas. For the waters had separated and the process of incrustation was started. What makes the world go around is the Divine Desire manifesting itself through the interrelationship of its parts. That Desire is not only beyond Spirit-Matter, it is the very cause of the two Opposing Forces. Earth is Solid Fire; water Liquid Fire; air Semi-spiritual Fire. The Spirit of the Earth is Hestia-Vesta, says Proclus. But Vesta is neither the spiritual, nor the physical Sun. She is animated by the Spirit of Life. Gaia’s symbol is Gamma, the third Greek letter and ideogram of both life eternal and of earthly life. The Jewish kabbalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with ceremonial magic, busied themselves solely with the spirits of the Planets and the “Elementals,” so-called. The Christian Theologians opposed the theory of the Earth’s rotation because, besides depriving our orb of its dignified central position in space, this theory produced an appalling confusion of ideas as to the Ascension, thus complicating the precise locality of heaven. The Spirit of Life issues from the Earth’s North Pole, flows around her, and becomes foul at the South Pole. In the first beginnings of human life on Earth, the only dry land was on the North Pole, where the gods rested and Fohat reigns ever since. Incrustation, however, is an incredibly slow process: the Earth did not reach her present grade of density until eighteen million years ago. The Earth needs solar heat and rain to make her throw out her germs. The procreative properties of Fire and Water, or Spirit and Matter, are symbols only of physical generation. In other words, Fire and Water are illusive emanations of their spiritual prototypes and, therefore, unclean and unholy. The Earth is now in her middle principle the astral body of self-importance, graspingness, and greed. Her present principle, the fourth in her septempartite constitution, is the astral body of desires (Kama-rupa) and of dark egotism (Ahamkara), the offspring of Mahat-Nous. The Earth will reach her true ultimate form, inversely in this to man, only toward the end of the Manvantara after the Seventh Round.