Elements I
Acrylic paint on upcycled LP records
by Emily May, maya_illusions_ on instagram
I thought it would be fun to begin the year with a contemplation of the elements (Fire, Earth, Water and Air). It was the Ancient Greeks who introduced the idea that these were the four basic ingredients that make up the world. The idea developed over several centuries of Greek philosophy with a great deal of divergence in thought regarding how the Elements came to be, what their exact natures were and how they come into the combinations which account for the variety and complexity of the natural world.
One thinker that stands out for me is Empedocles, who lived in the 5th century BC. His view was that the Elements, which he called “Roots” were of a “spiritual” nature, even attributing the names of Gods to each. Along with the four familiar elements, he proposed the existence of two co eternal forces; Love and Strife. The elements came into contact, and were mingled with one another, by the force of Love. They were separated by the force of strife. It is to Empedocles that my view of the Elements and how I employ them in my practice owes the greatest debt.
It is probably worth the time to consider how the Ancient Greek view the basic “ingredients” of the world differs from our own. When we think of Elements, we probably think of the periodic table with its many MANY elements. We think of these as absolutely “material”. Without getting lost in the weeds of what matter even IS or what, (if any) relation it has to “Spirit”, it is easy to think of the Ancient Greek view as simply a fumbling, low resolution view of what we now see and know in precise and well defined terms. Given this, it is interesting to consider the influence the idea of four simple ingredients still has on our imagination, especially those of us interested in “occult” matters. There are likely very few Tarot readers or practitioners of “Natural Magik” who believe that the world is literally composed of only four fundamental substances. We use these ideas to speak of how things are rather than what they are.
We call upon Water for cleansing of emotions, Fire for transformation and spiritual illumination. We may, if we wish, see this language as “metaphorical”: the washing away of toxic or traumatic attachment is like washing our bodies in clean water. But what if the literal washing of actual water is also a metaphor. What if the meaningful similarity between literal and figurative “cleansing” was the result of some spirit which we recognize in both. Washing your soul and washing your sheets are both like invoking the spirit of water for its cleansing power.
Before moving on to the individual Elements (as well as returning to the idea of Love and Strife), I want to look at the traditional symbols for the four elements to see what these can tell us about the nature of each, their relationship with one another and with the forces of Love (which brings things together) and Strife (which drives them apart)..
We see four triangles, two pointing upward, two down. One of the upward pointing triangles and one of the down have a horizontal line through them. This tells us that the four are divided into two different subgroups. The downward moving elements represent increasing concentration, density and “togetherness” while the upward moving represent increasing dissipation “separateness”. Concentration, bringing increasingly more into less space is the work of the force of Love, dissipation the work of Strife. Earth represents the extremity of concentration, Air that of dissipation. This is the meaning of the lines that pass through Earth and Air symbols. At the extremity of concentration in the Sign of Earth, a “fusion” takes place, no more of the Spirit (breath) can be contained and thus energy bursts forth. This is like what happens in the center of a star when the hydrogen is so tightly packed that the nuclei “touch” releasing massive amounts of energy. At the other end of the spectrum, at the extreme of dissipation in the Sign of Air, the spirit energy becomes unstructured. A fission takes place in which the Elements separate and drift until some strong force once more gathers them together. Watch your breath on a cold Winter day. You will see it escape in a cloud. This cloud dissipates and “cools” until it is indistinguishable from the air around it. That air will be “inhaled” by someone else and the whole process begins again. These are, of course, analogies. The behavior of matter in the physical world corresponds to the metaphysical principles which the Elements represent.
You may remember that the forces of Love and Strife, and their relation to the elements, comes down to us from Empedocles. I should be clear that while Empedocles claimed that these two forces were behind the change we see in the world, he only claimed that these forces mixed and separated the Elements which themselves remain unchanged. I am making a rather different claim, namely, that Love and Strife represent the Up/Down polarity that we see represented in the upward and downward pointing triangles that represent the Elements. In a sense, therefore, I am claiming that there is, in fact, only one “Elemental” entity which can be polarized in one way or another by the forces of Love and Strife. These forces, although they may seem opposed, are in fact, more like the “respiration” of matter. The force of love which brings things together is the inhalation, the literal inspiration of matter. Strife is the exhalation of spirit from matter. As things live and grow they become heavy with Spirit. When things die, the spirit is released from matter which decomposes soon thereafter. This cycling of spirit through matter is responsible for the “vibration” that various teachings attribute to all things. Below I have attempted to diagram the process as I have come to understand it.
I want to pause here and say a bit more about how modern ideas of entities such as atoms and elements differ from those of the Ancient Greeks. In our time the word Element refers to an array of material particles with different physical and chemical properties. It is these properties which allow the elements to combine and separate in staggeringly complex ways. We refer to these entities generically as atoms, but do not mean by this name what the Greeks meant. As has been said, atom meant un-cutable and we have known for sometime that there are ways to cut atoms. It is hard to know how literally the Greek philosophers believed that there were only four basic flavors of stuff. Harder still to imagine a world in which the very concept of a strictly material universe was not yet a well formed, let alone widely shared idea. The methods of investigating the natural world were, of course, limited by the available technology. But more than this, the lack of a definitive idea of matter as such would have made a strict distinction between the physical and spiritual worlds difficult to articulate. This is perhaps why Empedocles seemed to view the basic components of the “material” world as spiritual, (giving the Elements the names of Gods, calling them “roots” rather than atoms).
Empedocles presented his theory of nature through poetry. This was quite common in his time. Further, there was no clear distinction between what we would call natural science, religion, speculative philosophy and art. Thus, the view of the Greeks, and the ancient world in general, was more based on observation and analogy than empirical investigation and the scientific method. Some claim that teachers like Empedocles veiled their teachings in the obscurity of poetry so as to conceal it from those who might not have the moral purity to employ knowledge with wisdom. Similar claims are made about the teachings of alchemy. While there is good reason to believe that this is, at least in part, true, I think there was another, more fundamental reason for the practice of cloaking deep truths in poetry, namely, that this is, in fact, the function of poetry. In poetry we do not learn so much about what the world IS (which is, in fact, the function of natural science), rather, poetry tells us what the world is LIKE. Poetry has an oracular function like the reading of Tarot cards. When we speak of the Elements as spiritual practitioners, we ought to remember that we are always working by analogy. The language of Elements is not the language of things, it is the language of correspondences.
In the tradition of the epic nature poem I shall try to write my own poetic prose. The poem is like a song or dream or psychedelic trip: it may entertain or inform, it may thrill or frighten. Poems do not impart information but rather insight. Maybe these words will inspire you. Before I begin, I would like to use the invocation I use before every working I perform:
Oh great mother who gathers us in Love
Father who teaches us by strife.
We thank you,
For the Earth that supports us
And gives all things their shape and weight.
The Water that brings life, that cleanses and connects us.
The Fire that transforms us,
That warms and lights our way.
And Wind that carries everything in perfect truth
Unto the far flung regions of the world
So mote it be.
Love is the force of attraction.
The lode stone loves the lode star.
The star has no connection to the stone, and yet
By their analogy, the ancient mariners
Compassed the globe and found their way home.
This is the magik!
To know the way of Love.
At the south pole of the magnet, lines of force unite
like rivers to the sea.
The Air pools in our wet lungs.
God breathes’ his breath into the world, not knowing
That while He was breathing out, SHE was breathing Him in.
And here we come to Water.
Flowing ever downward in Her courses.
It will take the power of Fire and Wind to lift her from the Sea.
In her travels,
From rivulets to torrents, she touches many things.
Carrying them with her as she goes.
Wearing down mountains and washing an infant’s face.
She remembers without grasping
Yet everything will yield to her power.
Everything we do will one day come out in the wash.
She fills our pots and ponds and eyes with tears.
She passes through a billion generations.
We flow with her,
Making poems and supper, making waves.
Something pours through us and leaves behind
A sediment of deeds
like mountains wearing ever to the river bed and sea shore.
She carries our boats and our dreams
That we might meet and come together.
She fills one cup that we must share.
And when she finally drains away,
Clay tablets tell the story of our time.
At last we come to bedrock
The Earth is vast and wide.
To recon Her mass
We must count the weight of our bones
And the bones of those who brought us here.
Mother’s milk becomes these bones
As sure as rivers carve and make their beds.
The ocean floor a carpet mass of everything
That finally comes to rest.
Deeper still we find treasure,
Lost ships and oil and precious stones of pressure, heat and time.
Everything gathers unto Her body
Her secret depth bares magma.
Pele opens her womb and builds mountains.
A billion seeds turn inside out.
A billion Mothers bare their young.
A billion generations mine her bones
To build their striving towers to the sun.
The stillness of the Earth brings forth a billion dances.
Dances of courtship and war and commerce.
Men may jump and even fly but never do we leave her.
Even the pentacle coins that form our take home pay are affordances of earth.
Everything we have belongs to her.
Even the Fire of the sun owes its brightness to the binding power of Love.
This is how the power of Love in Earth bares Fire.
Fire in the east and all arise.
Into the forests and fields
To raise the Wands of plants.
The cattle graze upon these shoots.
Men raise wood and coal and oil to light
The fires of their visions.
Fire to aspire and inquire,
Light to all we do.
Light born from all embracing darkness.
Daedalus builds wings,
To carry us into luminous Air.
We are his striving sons.
One day we may fly into the heart of fire.
Moths that fatally court a lantern’s light.
Strife tempers a sword
In Fire and icy water,
Holds it in the air.
The ax and sickle cut the trees and grasses.
Death will come as sure as Libra’s justice.
The analytic scale weighs our deeds.
Spears and scalpels slice the whispering Air.
Death returning us to Air.
The wind who carries hymns to gods and Ancestors,
Caries their fading echos back to us.
Carries the scents of our cooking fires.
Fires that feed our babies and alert the circling wolves.
The Air of our grandparents parting breath to tell us
All is well and all is as it should be.
The seed and pollen heavy wind
Whistling in the grave yard.
And so the cycle’s end is reached.
The still and silent body returns in gas and ash.
The dust that formed the earth, the gas that lights the stars.
The force lines rise and separate.
A tree that bares the leaves that fall to feed it.
And now I break this circle and dismiss the elemental forces.
Go in peace
Go in peace
Go in peace
So mote it be.
There is so much more that can and should be said about the Elements. The how and why of their use in magic. The way they manifest in stones and stares and implements, in Tarot cards and astrology. I will dedicate at least one more of these entries to the mystery and power of The Elements.
On January 25th, I will return with my offering on the Tarot cards associated with Aquarius. On February 8th, I will offer another entry on the Elements. I will try to focus more closely on how they show up in the so called “Western Esoteric Tradition” and how I use them in my work.
Once again, I think you from the bottom of my heart for sharing the gift of your attention and consideration.
Blessed Be