Whenever I happen to be on my way back from St. Louis City to my own home a county or two away, I pass under a sign that hangs in the Science Center’s skyway dedicated to telling me the quality of the air. “Good” is a frequent and welcome verdict, radiating in a dull, digital green on the edges of my peripheral vision as I whiz down the highway towards a midday coffee and a walk in the park on, say, a Sunday afternoon. Yellow typically suggests a middling, red the “Poor” quality.
Air quality has been, in its way, a minor theme over the course of my life. I grew up at the height of the crisis surrounding the ozone layer, and when climate science was coming into public view as a matter of human survival; while I agreed with the science, political discourse on the matter usually reminded me of Mel Brooks’ President Scroob from Spaceballs taking a clandestine lungful of oxygen from a can. In those days, one could rely on Stewart and Colbert to skewer politicians that doubted that we were really harming our atmosphere so very much over the air; these days, the greenhouse effect is hardly disputable. “This can’t be air,” my friend recently remarked as we stepped out from the gym into the oppressive 98 degree gloaming of a recent July evening; his is the sentiment, of course, of vast portions of the populated globe experiencing record-breaking heat this and every summer now as a norm. Air can also be the medium of fire’s particulate residue, as the threat of wildfire smoke spreading ash across the winds to lands beyond the American West insist. St. Louis is particularly given to haze and humidity that often makes the air feel and even look a little dirtier than it might otherwise be at any given time; I have often found that haze a source of depression, as though it were a smudge on the glass reminding a bird (supply your favorite; mine is the raven) that she is still at the zoo. The winds also, of course, drive tempests like cattle across the vast expanse of sky: wind will tell one that rain is on the way by smell long before any bursting cloud is visible. It has always surprised me that despite this perfectly fair warning and the fact that large portions our metropolitan area regularly flood when such disasters hit, St. Louis has never really invested in recent infrastructure for the mass quantities of rain we get around once or twice a year. And of course, everyone has thought and spoken almost incessantly for the better part of the last three years about a very specific sort of airborne water, that is, the respiratory droplets conveying COVID-19.
Wind or air is the bearer of the other three classical elements; for the ancients, it is in a finer form what fire, earth, and water are in less subtle and more tangible apparitions. Not all air is the same. Winds might be negative or positive, toxic or invigorating; some air reeks of the miasma of death and impurity, and some air brings life and power. Winds may be cold or hot, wet or dry; they may be the source of intelligence or stupidity dependent on the clime (at least, this is how ancient Greeks and Romans habitually justified their xenophobia). The aerial realm is the great barrier separating the world below from the aither above; all that the cosmos gives the earth filters down through it and all that earth yields up in return is borne upwards by the zephyrs.
This, at least, is the logic that guides many ancient mythological, cosmological, and theological portrayals of wind. Vayu, the Vedic god of wind, is the first, for example, to enjoy the fruits of sacrifice as he carries them upwards to Indra and the other gods (Rgveda I.134.1, 6; VII.92.1). From his belly spring the Maruts, the monsoon storm divinities (I.134.4). These rowdy young gods—a divine “association of young men, usually at a stage of life without significant other social ties (such as wife and children), who band together for rampageous and warlike pursuits”1 are Indra’s romping companions (hence his title marutvant, “accompanied by Maruts”), riding out with him from the northwest armed in gold and wielding the vajra, helping him to slay Vrtra (though it should be noted that Indra contests the extent of their involvement; e.g., I.165).2 Their rambunctious, violent behavior also earns them the name of the Rudras, implying in some versions of their mythography that they are children of Rudra. Vayu’s Zoroastrian counterpart, the Avestan Wayu or Pahlavi Way (let the reader recall that the early Indo-European migrants and settlers in the Gangetic plain share common ancestry and more or less a common cultic inheritance with ancient Iranians) is also an important god: in that mythology, he is an ahura (equivalent to the Sanskrit asura, which comes to signify a demigod or demonic being), yazata (in Young Avestan), or baga (Old Persian) of the intermediate space between heaven and earth. He is an intrinsically mercurial god, representing destiny and a dualism between good and bad fortune; like Vayu, he has a distinctive role in the birth of the universe.3 In his more physical aspect as Vata, Vayu is the literal, natural phenomenon of the wind, the “breath (atman) of the gods” (X.168.4). It is in this latter sense that Vayu is most important to later Vedic religion and classical Hinduism, though some of his mythological character endures in later Hindu stories. “Life-breath [prana, another name for Vayu]” declares in Prashna Upanishad that “[d]ividing myself fivefold, it is I alone who holds this body and sustains it” (PU 2.3). Convincing the other bodily sustaining devas of his sovereignty by demonstrating that they rise and fall as he does, they declare: “He burns as fire. He is the sun. He is the rain cloud. He is the bountiful [that is, Maghavan, Indra]. He is the wind. He is earth, matter, power of nature (deva), being and nonbeing, and what is immortal” (2.4-5). And again: “It is you who move in the womb as lord of creation; it is you alone who are born anew. All creatures bring you sustenance, O life-breath, who dwell with the senses” (2.7). “You,” echoing Vayu’s role in Rgveda, “are the chief bearer [of offerings] to the gods; you are the first offering to the fathers; you are the true way of the seers” (2.8); “Through your brilliance, O life-breath, you are Indra, as the protector of all, you are Rudra, as the sun, you move through the firmament, you, the lord of lights” (2.9). “All that is here and all that is in the third heaven falls under the dominion of the life-breath” (2.13). Its origin is exalted: “This life-breath is born of the Self. Just as a shadow spreads over a man, so does the life-breath spread over the Self. Through the activity of the mind, it enters the body” (3.3). Wind is, especially, the life-breath of Purusha, the primordial cosmanthropos: “His head is fire, his eyes are the moon and the sun, his ears are the regions of space, his speech is the Vedas unfolded, his breath is the wind, his heart is the universe and from his feet comes the earth. Truly, he is the inner Self of all beings” (MU 2.1.4). In Chandogya Upanishad, the One God is “Agni, fire. He is Aditya, the sun. He is Vayu, the wind. He is Chandrama, the shining one. He is Shukra, the pure. He is Brahman. He is the waters and he is Prajapati, the Lord of created beings” (CU 4.2). In classical Hinduism, Vayu is often taken to be the deity who descends together with Vishnu into the world to rectify adharma: as Hanuman in the Ramayana, as Bhima in the Mahabharata, and Madhvacarya in the current evil age (Kaliyuga), the founder of Dvaita or “dualistic” Vedanta. Pranayama, “breath-control,” is a fundamental practice of virtually all yogic schools, and its practice is advocated as early as Vedic yajna itself (it is, for example, a central concern of Aitareya Brahmana). There are “seven upward breaths, seven downward breaths, and seven pervasive breaths” that the officiant must master (Atharvaveda 15.16.1-2); for, as Chandogya Upanishad clarifies, “the mind, dear boy, is tied to the breath” (CU 6.8.2).4 The ubiquity of breath-control practices in ancient India—for expiation and purification, for liberation, for practice of mantras5—explain the importance of pranayama both to later Yoga as well as to the renunciant traditions of Jainism and Early Buddhism. Anapanasanti—“mindfulness of breathing”—is the early precedent in Buddhist teaching to the later vipassana, (specifically Buddhist form of) samadhi, and zazen, regarded as anything from the most important purification and pedagogy for attaining nibbana to the practiced realization of one’s always, already enlightened nature itself. (June 20th, incidentally, is the international holiday for anapanasanti.)
“Wind” and “breath” frequently render the same words in English translations of these texts, just as they do in Abrahamic ones. In Genesis 1:2, for example, the ruach Elohim that sweeps across the primordial waters of creation is rightly, as both JPS and Robert Alter elect, “a wind from God” or the “wind of God,” rather than “the spirit of God,” at least if we understand “spirit” as something immaterial where “wind” is something quasi-corporeal. But this itself is to misunderstand the sense of the Latin spiritus and the Greek it frequently translates, pneuma: both words to ancient readers suggested a corporeal or material element, the most vital life-breath, the most specialized and important sort of wind, most similar in quality to the cosmic aither of which the bodies of stars and gods were made. Both David Bentley Hart and I myself have written on this here and elsewhere, summarizing and in some cases expanding the work of other scholars. As Francesca Stavrakopoulou puts it, pneuma’s “fiery heat and dynamism gave it a generative quality easily qualified as divine in origin”: this is the corporeal YHWH’s own life-breath, the wind from his lungs charging forth through the universe and vivifying the worlds. Long before this is the tertiary hypostasis of the Holy Trinity, God in his tropos hyparxeos as the “Lord and Creator of Life” in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol, God’s wind is as intimate and bodily a connection between him and the world as the breath of one’s own parent or lover in embrace. The Gospel of John is indicative here. Pneuma language occurs directly 18 times in John (Jn 1:32-33; 3:5-6, 8, 34; 4:23-24; 6:63; 7:39; 11:33; 13:21; 14:17, 26; 15:26; 16:13; 19:30; 20:22); but it functions perionymically with other concepts, like zoe, “life” (Jn 3:15-16, 36; 4:10-11, 14, 36; 5:21, 24-26, 29, 39-40; 6:27, 33, 35, 40, 46, 48-449, 51, 53-54, 56-57, 63, 68; 7:38; 8:12; 10:10, 27; 11:25-26; 12:25, 50; 14:6, 19; 17:2-3; 20:31), phos or “light” (1:4-5, 7-9; 3:19-21; 8:12; 9:5; 11:9-10; 12:35-36, 46), and aletheia or “truth,” given that the pneuma in question is the pneuma aletheias or “spirit of truth” (1:9, 14, 17, 47; 3:21, 33; 4:18, 23-24, 37, 42; 5:31-33; 6:14, 32, 55; 7:18, 26, 28, 40; 8:13-14, 16-17, 26, 31-32, 40, 44-46; 10:41; 14:6, 17; 15:1, 26; 16:7, 13; 17:3, 8, 17, 19; 18:37-38; 19:35; 21:24). Some of the statements about “wind” in this Gospel are striking: “unless someone be born from water and wind, it is not possible to enter the kingdom of God” (3:5); “the thing born from flesh is flesh, and the thing born from wind is wind” (3:6); “the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its voice, but you do not know whence it comes and whither it goes; thus is everyone born from the wind” (3:8); “the true worshipers will worship the Father in wind and truth” (4:23); “God is wind” (4:24); “the wind is the life-creating thing, the flesh does not benefit at all; the words which I have spoken to you are wind and life” (6:63). The popular way of putting the matter, that pneuma can mean either spirit or wind, misses the point: spirit means wind, and its more exalted associations simply reflect a cosmology in which air was not simply a concatenation of molecules and particulates, but the divine intermediary between the other elements and the universe at large, in some systems, within which all things subsist. The Johannine Jesus’ straightforward equivocation between God (ho theos) and pneuma should strike the modern reader as especially alien given what the ancients thought pneuma was: Jesus is doing nothing less than cosmology with the Samaritan Woman. True: later Christianity, concluding that God (ho theos) must be incorporeal in his utter transcendence of every creaturely category, and then also that the Holy Spirit (to pneuma to hagion) is what it is to be God, came to conclude that “spirit” was something immaterial and noetic; but the ambiguities in the language endured, as the favored way to talk about this third member of the divine triad remained not the more philosophical explanations of the particular mode of God’s existence he named (the knowledge of Father as knower and Son as known, or the Love of Father as Lover and Son as Beloved, uniting the two in a common third term), but by “wind.” And the Stoic ideas about pneuma that animated the New Testament were absorbed, not elided, in Middle and Neoplatonism: while Plutarch and much later Plotinus might have rejected the idea that the divine was a corporeal element, both appreciated the notion of an immanent and active divine principle in the universe that was responsible for cosmic sympathy, ubiquitous life, and the access of life to consciousness. For Plotinus and his successors, this hypostasis is simply Soul or the World Soul; it performs pneuma’s functions without having its exact Stoic description. So, too, with the Holy Spirit in Christianity.
As late as the fourth century, the dominant way in which Greek and Syriac Christians at least spoke of the human person continued to acknowledge a diversity of life forces whose philosophical antecedents were a variety of different kinds of wind or spirit. Medieval Byzantine and Latin Christians began moving in a more simplifying direction, of collapsing spirit (as the indwelling divine presence of the Spirit in each individual creature) and soul (as the particular animating life force of this specific creature) into the same entity. Jews and Muslims did a better job, generally, than Christians did of continuing to separate the principles at play here: the variety of souls acknowledged in Rabbinic and Kabbalistic Judaism, as well as in certain forms of Islam (especially Sufism), is more continuous with ancient philosophies and religious systems than is the contemporary Christian habit of speaking generally and flatly of “the soul.” For Jews, nephesh, ruach, and neshamah all name distinct animating and spiritual principles of ascending importance and divine pedigree; Muslims generally know nafs (the Arabic equivalent to the Hebrew nephesh) and rūḥ (ruach), with various subdivisions within these two categories proposed by different Muslim philosophers of note. And, of course, this helped make Islam especially a somewhat better dialogue partner with South Asian traditions, that also acknowledged a variety of distinct animating principles, related to wind or air, than Christianity has sometimes been: jiva (from jiv, “to breathe” or “to live”), atman (derived from the Indo-European root that also gives us atma in Greek, “air,” whence our “atmosphere”), prana, and the like. Even in Buddhism, where atman as an eternal self is rejected, the relevance of breath as the transient life principle is to some degree essential to realizing the emptiness and impermanence of all things.
Gods of wind are never far from gods of thunder, as is the case with Vayu and Indra, or with YHWH, the storm god of the northwest Arabian steppe who ascended the Judahite and Israelite pantheon to displace Baal and merge with El, who “makes the winds his messengers” (Ps 104:4). In Greek myth, this function appears to have been fulfilled by Zeus’ relationship to Hermes, the angelos of the Olympians, where the deified winds proper—Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, and Eurus—answer, at least in Homer, to King Aeolus (who does not recur beyond the Odyssey other than for a brief allusive appearance in the Aeneid). The associations between air and storm are obvious; and the sky can, as the Romans marveled, also rain down things other than water, like the periodic curiosity of stones falling from the sky in certain parts of Italy (frequently assumed to have an epiphanic quality in ancient Roman religion), or even meteors. Our contemporary science fiction imagines all sorts of things that might fall out of the sky, from the momentous to the humorously mundane: everything from Superman’s pod to Joe Dirt’s frozen toilet meteor bespeaks the ongoing human sense that if something comes down out of the air, it must be somehow significant. Our age’s grandest aspirations for humanity involve perfecting the art of sailing upon the air—which we discovered a mere 119 years ago—to return, as our more recent ancestors did, to the Moon and on to worlds beyond. And indeed, some of those visions can be remarkably beautiful stories about the human future: some of our ancestors’ reverence for the skies endures in our contemporary fascination with them. Others, of course, can be positively nightmarish (the reader may guess that the topic of the wider cosmos will occupy the next installment), and many of our present activities in the lower heavens are simply demonic. Christians once insisted on divided skies: “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2), the archon of this sublunary realm, pollutes our lungs with his evil winds. He and his underlings, as in the visions of several early martyrs and ascetics, seek to oppose the ascent of human souls to the divine throne, an apocalyptic sensibility of spiritual warfare and cosmic dualism that would later be reborn as the popular (but problematic) tollhouse eschatology. Whether these daimones are best understood as a vicious border patrol or simply cosmic bureaucrats, they are the true enemy: “our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the archai, the authorities, the cosmocrats of this darkness, against the spiritual things of evil in the heavenlies” (Eph 6:12). This Jewish apocalyptic cosmology—shared to some extent with the wider Greco-Roman belief that the skies were populated with all kinds of gods and creatures—certainly also influenced later Islam’s concept of jinn. And yet another equally consistent stream in the earliest Christian thinking stands as something of an antimony here: Christ, by his ascent through the heavens, has already vanquished and subordinated the aerial and celestial powers to God; we, through baptism, are already ascended and enthroned with and in Christ at God’s right hand (Eph 2:4-9). Christ has already come as the beacon for the divine pneuma to come into the world and drive out evil winds and malign spirits, back to the desert wastes through whose weltered ruins they wind and wail. But in today’s world, one could be forgiven for thinking that the “prince of the power of the air” has either not been totally driven out or has simply passed as a title to a different incumbent: I am not sure what other than spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places, for instance, the godlike ability to drone strike, bomb, and obliterate anyone or anything from the air can be described as. The vajra of Indra and Zeus, Thor’s hammer (a culturally relevant symbol for present generations thanks largely to Marvel Comics), YHWH’s bow of war: what is frightening about the sky in our day is that men now wield those weapons they once feared in the hands of gods. And far from hymning Vayu or honoring Hera as the sublunary air, we simply do to our atmosphere what we already do to water and land: whether we deplete our safety barrier, the ozone, or profusely litter the upper skies with our metallic and plastic trash, we regularly prove unworthy to handle the power of aerial and astral gods we so deeply crave.
The sky enchants us. We love flying, even though it is terrible for the environment below; we also love flying less damaging ways, like sky diving, balloons, and gliders. When we want to talk about the possibilities resident within our imagination beyond the material restraints of our lived experience we say we are engaging in “blue-sky thinking”; “dark skies” still suggest ominous and portentous events to us who generally believe neither in omens nor in portents (or who at least say we do not). Aerial entertainment is replete in our popular culture. Hayao Miyazaki’s supposedly final film, The Wind Rises (2013), a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982), an aircraft designer for the Japanese Empire in the Second World War, grossed $136.5 million; Makoto Shinkai’s 2019 Weathering With You, about a girl whose mystical connection to the skies allows her to control the weather, grossed $193.65 million. And, of course, Tom Cruise’s sequel to the original Top Gun (1986), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), following a talented but cocksure Air Force pilot, has grossed $1.2 billion. We spend more money imagining being in the sky than we would ever spend, frankly, trying to clean it up. From fighter jets and other realistic dirigibles to the fantasy companions of sky bison or the Eagles of Manwë, we want very much to go up; would that our justifiable enthusiasm for the air encouraged greater responsibility about its stewardship.
There are certain prerequisites to any other pursuit or argument we might wish to have. We cannot build healthy families, communities, towns, or cities, receive, transmit, cultivate, change, or invent religions, do good science, make terrific art, argue politics, drink coffee, adore and agonize over our pets, experience ennui, laugh, watch cartoons, garden, exercise, go to the zoo, shake our heads disapprovingly at a newspaper, complain about the very young or the very old—anything, really, that makes life meaningful if we cannot breathe the air, tolerate the heat, work the soil, or drink the water, and if we do not have a vibrant diversity of what Stephen RL Clark calls “Lifekind” to do it with us. There is simply no common responsibility more important than the biosphere: the elemental, microbial, botanical, animate, and human world in all of its glory and terror that we so briefly here indwell. There is no use in trying to do philosophy or theology, especially, if we cannot appreciate the fragile beauty of what Sagan called our pale blue dot: our whole soul encompassed by the thin sphere of air shielding us from cosmic infinity, carrying our sacrifices and sacrelige to gods beyond.
See Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, trans., The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49.
See Jamison and Brereton, The Rigveda, 50.
See his description in Prods Oktor Skjaervo, The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 17.
The translations are from James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (New York: Penguin, 2017), 126-169.
See Mallinson and Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 129-134.
You realize that, in proclaiming everything to be divine, all you are doing is devaluing the concept faster than a Zimbabwean dollar? If a bubble gum wrapper and the weeds in my garden are divine then divinity is nothing to write home about.