The formation of clouds is an interesting meditation on what an alchemist would call the lawfulness of the becoming of form, or what Goethe called the Archetype. In the ancient world, it was understood that forms in nature were images of the activity of world-creating beings: Gods and Goddesses and members of celestial hierarchies. The hierarchies and their relationships with each other were imaged in the forms of nature. The spirals and undulating waves contained in animal bodies or the ripples in a stream bed or in the sky were images of the creative activities and creative thoughts of world-creating beings. The Creators moved in their will and the forms of nature made the movements manifest.

An image of this process can be found in the formation of a sandbar in a river. The current is the motion which is carrying the formative forces in a particular set of harmonically coordinated movements. The resistance of the banks of the river causes the flowing motion to slow down and the sand falls out of the motion of the river but retains an image of the forces streaming through the movements in the manifest form of the sandbar. A cloud is very similar to a sandbar in the atmosphere. It forms in a current of air and the precipitation patterns itself after the forces which are around the cloud, participating in its becoming process. The previous descriptions of cloud formations were examples of these form/process relationships.

In the language of the mystery tradition the processes were not simply mechanical forces. The formative processes in nature were seen as the conscious activities of transcendent world-creative beings. The beings who created worlds were known in the mystery language as Archetypes. The Archetypes created worlds in which their creative deeds as movements manifested beings whose form was in the image of the creators. In the mystery tradition the formative patterns in nature were considered as images of creative beings and their modes of creation. The form of the sandbar in a stream was an image of flow and resistance. The forces of flow and resistance in the physical stream were the same forces of flow and resistance in a person’s life. The patterns of the forces that produced forms in nature were not seen simply as abstract forces. They were considered to be the activities of elemental and hierarchical beings, or nature spirits. In this way the blood flowing in a person’s veins and the water in the river were united through a common access to the same spiritual beings. These beings were thought to produce the forms of the natural world.

In the science of meteorology, regarding the formation of clouds, the most fundamental pattern is what is known as a convection cell. The great mystery of convection lies in the inner relationships of the warmth and cold within a growing cloud. These relationships are depicted below.

In this image warm air rising from the surface of the Earth lifts up to higher altitudes in columns. The warm air seeks other warm air in the vicinity, masses together into a central area and rises upward in one mass. The massing and rising is called convergence. This creates the updraft that builds the cloud. As the mass of warm air converges and then rises, it expands. As it expands it cools down. This is a critical element in the formation of clouds.

This is because, if the column of rising warm air within a cloud were to continue to rise and expand without cooling as it rose, then the first cloud which ever formed would have taken all of the warmth away from the Earth and vented the warmth out into space never to return. All of the warmth below would then be attracted to this vent and a super hurricane would have formed that would vent all of the warm air on the surface. The result would be a frozen Earth devoid of warmth.

In the illustration, we see that the warm air rising in the center of the cloud eventually rises to the upper atmosphere where it cools down considerably. As the air aloft cools it becomes denser and starts to sink down the sides of the cloud. As it sinks down the outside of the cloud as dense cold air it begins to pressurize the areas of the atmosphere that lie below it. As the atmosphere near to the surface of the Earth becomes pressurized, the temperature of the falling air goes up. This is the downward side of the convection. Taken together the rising and expanding and the cooling pattern, and the sinking and the contracting and the warming pattern work into each other and create a cell-like form in the atmosphere known as a convection cell by meteorologists. Behind every cloud form in the atmosphere there is a convection cell operating. If there were no convection cells with their warming of the sinking cold air, the first parcel of cold air pouring out of a cloud toward Earth would have settled into low places as cold air. This cool air would quickly cool all of the air around it until eventually all of the air on the Earth would be cooled to a degree that life could not exist.

So on one side of the great mystery of the archetypal convection cell we find that as warm air rises it simultaneously cools as it rises. For every kilometer of ascent there is a 10° Celsius drop in temperature. This means between sea level and an altitude of 50,000 feet there will be between a -50° to -100° Fahrenheit drop in temperatures. The range of differences lies in the fact that the air parcels may start out at the surface with very different temperatures, and that there are various zones of different densities and properties at higher altitudes. At a certain height the parcel of air in the convection cell reaches an equilibrium with its surroundings and ceases to rise. However it is now very cold air, and without its upward momentum it begins to sink.

This brings into play the other side of the convection cell as an archetypal pattern of forces. As cold air sinks it increases in pressure. As it increases in pressure it warms. As the originally cold air continues to sink it reaches an equilibrium with its surroundings and stops sinking. It is now warmer than the surrounding air but it is in the lower parts of the atmosphere. The inner relationships in the convection cycle that govern cloud formation are the footprints of the archetype of balance and inner harmony. This archetype works by bringing opposite tendencies into relationship with each other.

We can see the activity of this archetype in a very abstract way in the image of the governor in a mechanical system. A governor is a device that keeps the forces in a mechanical or electrical system within certain limits. The surge protector for your electrical devices is a kind of governor. It prevents an excess of power from destroying the delicate components in your computer.

In natural systems the function of the governor brings the extremes that the system is capable of into relationship with each other. Muscles are organized so that one motion in one direction is automatically braked by muscles in the opposing pair moving simultaneously in the opposite direction. One set of hormones secreted by a particular gland is immediately balanced by another secretion in another part of the system. In the upper regions of the atmosphere, the ozone layer is a governor that limits the amount of ultraviolet radiation that can enter into the lower layers of the atmosphere. Through delicately balanced feedback relationships, this atmospheric ozone protects and balances the whole of the Earth’s living systems. The ozone layer is at most 8 miles (12.8 km) deep. The atmosphere up to the ionosphere is 600 miles (970 km) deep. This layer, comparatively not even as thick as an eggshell is to an egg, is the governor of life on Earth. Rudolf Steiner calls ozone by its esoteric name, the Breath of the Etheric Christ.

Here we can see in the mystery language the same phenomenon that is found in science as feedback systems or reciprocating forces. If we imagine to ourselves everywhere in nature where a feedback circuit of forces is active, we can begin to form an initial view of the idea of Christ as the Lord of the Etheric Realm. This is the realm of life where polarities are always linked to their complements as a way of sustaining the life forces within the system. Were it not for these delicate and complex relationships in the natural world, there would be no potential for life to go on. It is in this way that we can imagine the reciprocating polarities of convection and feedback circuits as the aspect of Christ as the governor of all life, or as the ancient Celts called Him, Christ the Lord of the Elements. In this way, we can perhaps just begin to see why learning about the patterns of coming into being that are present in the clouds might be a very fruitful and insightful way to look for traces of Him when trying to understand the great mystery of the Second Coming.