The four elements have been used since antiquity to describe the matter composing the universe. It is a concept developed within the study of natural sciences by ancient philosophy. The concept is also employed in astrology to describe the components of the zodiac. The classical elements were a hypothesis put forth by some pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. According to this hypothesis, all materials constituting the world would be composed of four elements.
History of Classical Elements and Applications to Modern Disciplines
Originally, the four elements were a hypothesis put forth by some pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, notably Empedocles in the 5th century BCE. According to this hypothesis, all materials constituting the world would be composed of four elements, each later represented by a different symbol in the alchemical tradition:
- Earth
- Water
- Air
- Fire
Every substance present in the universe would be composed of one or more of these elements, in varying quantities. This would explain the more or less volatile, hot, cold, wet, or dry nature (the four elemental qualities) of each matter. The theory is based on philosophical and speculative arguments.
Pre-Socratic philosophers imagined a primary essence in everything. Thales, the first to seek the original element, chose water; Heraclitus saw fire as the element at the origin of all matter; Anaximenes considered air as the essence of everything; and finally, Empedocles, in the early 5th century BCE, proposed that the four elements combined composed the universe. For Democritus, the universe was composed of atoms (Greek: a-tomos, “indivisible”), microscopic and eternal particles that would form matter like bricks forming a wall and would have the general shape of the object (round, pointed, concave, etc.).
During the Crusades in the 12th century in the Holy Land and the Reconquista in Spain, the knowledge of the Greeks and the Aristotelian theory of elements were rediscovered in the West. However, the preserved writings were mainly those of Aristotle’s teachings. Democritus’s writings did not survive, and even today, we know Democritus’s texts only in a fragmented manner, through what some authors, especially Aristotle, tell us. The scholastics of the Middle Ages embraced these speculations on the quaternity of nature and incorporated them into their Christian worldview.
Empedocles
The foundational text is found in Empedocles (around 460 BCE):
“First, know the fourfold root
Of all things: Zeus with luminous fires,
Hera, mother of life, and then Aidoneus,
Finally, Nestis, with tears that mortals drink.”
This text can be interpreted in two different ways: one may think that Zeus, the god of celestial light, refers to Fire; Hera, his spouse, to Air; Aidoneus (Hades), the god of the underworld, to Earth; and Nestis (Persephone) to Water. However, Jean Stobaeus associates Earth (the feminine principle) with Hera and Air (the masculine principle) with Aidoneus.
Empedocles adds to the four material elements two spiritual forces. Diogenes Laertius describes Empedocles’s theories: “There are four elements, fire, water, earth, and air. Friendship unites them, and hatred separates them” (VIII, 76).
The order or hierarchy of the elements is also subject to interpretation. According to the first interpretation presented above, Empedocles names the elements in the following order, without explaining why: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. Aristotle, based on the idea that heat rises and there is always earth under water, establishes the following sequence: Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.
The completeness of this system is also debatable. How many elements are there? Young Aristotle and the author of the Epinomis will add a fifth element, the quintessence: Ether. This last element, which constitutes the substrate of celestial bodies, is not subject to generation and corruption, changes in quality or dimension, and it moves not in a straight line like the others but in a circle (Aristotle, On the Heavens, I, 2, 3). This explains the circular motion of the stars (a motion actually due to the rotation of the Earth).
Plato’s solids
Plato, in the Timaeus, perhaps inspired by the Pythagorean school, believes that the four elements are made of cubic particles (Earth), icosahedra (Water), octahedra (Air), tetrahedra (Fire) (Timaeus, 56), and the sphere of the world (the All) is a dodecahedron (Timaeus, 55e-56a). The elements are thus linked to the surfaces of the solids; the four regular polyhedra then known are the tetrahedron (Timaeus, 56b), regular hexahedron (cube), octahedron, and icosahedron; and the All is a dodecahedron (Phaedo, 110b; Timaeus, 55c). Fire, Air, and Water are made of equilateral triangles (24, 48, and 129 scalene elementary triangles), the earth of squares (24 isosceles elementary triangles), and the All of pentagons (12 pentagons irreducible to triangles).
In his esoteric oral teaching, Plato wants to “establish correspondences” (prospherein) between dimensions (unity or numbers or indivisible lines, lines or lengths, surfaces or planes, volumes or solids), figures (indivisible lines, lines, triangle, pyramid), and numbers (1, 2, 3, 4: the numbers of the Tetractys), but also the elements.
Thus, behind the analogy between dimensions, figures, numbers, and elements, establish correspondences between unity/indivisible lines/one/fire, between lengths/lines/two/air, etc. “What is absolutely indivisible but with position is a point; what is divisible along one dimension is a line; what is divisible along two dimensions is a surface; what is absolutely divisible in quantity and along three dimensions is a body [a volume]” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Delta, 6, 1016b).
Symbolism and Elemental Qualities
The Pythagorean Alcmaeon is said to have founded (around 500 BCE) the theory of the four elemental qualities: hot, cold, dry, and moist.
“According to Alcmaeon, the balance of powers, such as moist and dry, cold and hot, bitterness and sweetness, etc., produces and maintains good health; on the contrary, the dominance of one of them causes illness, and when two of these powers dominate, death follows.”
The Sicilian physician Philistion, a contemporary of Plato, assigned the four qualities to the four elements: Fire is hot, Air is cold, Water is moist, and Earth is dry.
The most decisive contribution to the theory of the four elements came from Aristotle, who added the concept of four elemental qualities associated two by two and opposing. He also provided a natural order: at the bottom is earth, then water, then air, finally fire (the Sun), and ether for celestial bodies.
“As there are four elements, and the possible combinations, for four terms, are six in number; but, since opposites cannot be coupled, cold and hot, dry and moist can never blend into one thing, it is evident that there will be only four combinations of the elements: on the one hand, hot and dry, hot and moist; and on the other hand, cold and dry, cold and moist. This is a natural consequence of the existence of bodies that appear simple, such as fire, air, water, and earth. Thus, fire is hot and dry; air is hot and moist, since air is a kind of vapor; water is cold and liquid; and finally, earth is cold and dry. It follows that the distribution of these differences among the primary bodies is easily understood, and the number of each is in perfect proportion.”
The symbolic interpretation of the four elements is based on their decomposition into four elemental qualities along two axes of analysis: hot and cold on the one hand (two active qualities) and dry and moist on the other hand (two passive qualities).
- Hot is generally a principle of energy, activity, and impulse. In contrast, cold is a principle of passivity and resistance.
- Dry is a process of analysis, separation, individualization, contraction, and withdrawal into detail or oneself. It takes place in a rigid and brittle atmosphere, going to extremes. In contrast, moist is a process of synthesis, connection, collectivization, and openness to wholeness and the collective. It occurs in an atmosphere of relaxation and flexibility.
The conjunction of an active quality and a passive quality acting on an undifferentiated raw material generates one or the other of the elements. In this analysis, earth inherits cold and dry qualities (these are the qualities of ashes), fire is dry and hot, air is hot and moist (qualities of exhaled breath), and water is cold and moist.
In addition to these four elemental qualities, there are also secondary and derived qualities, always opposed two by two, such as subtle and thick (i.e., the arrangement in the form of fragments of large or small dimension), heavy and light, bitter and sweet, fluid and viscous…
Furthermore, the generation of elements through an interaction of elemental qualities implies a dynamic between the elements. Reality is not static; elements that share an elemental quality can transform into each other. Fire can transform by modifying one of its two qualities into either air or earth; earth into fire or water; water into earth or air; and air into water or fire.
Finally, each element subdivides into varieties, depending on measures of participation and mixtures. For example, three types of fire are distinguished: the burning flame, light, and the incandescent remnants of the flame (embers).
Aristotle correlated the senses with the elements. Sight and color are linked to fire, “the intermediary of sounds is air,” smell occurs through a medium that is air or even water, “nothing produces a taste sensation without moisture,” and touch is linked to earth. Aristotle always gives the sequence ether, fire, air, water, and earth, and this order will prevail, with ether (not fire) being considered the matter of the stars and the element where they reside.
Applications to Plato’s Cosmology
In Plato’s geocentric cosmology, the universe is divided according to the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Each of them has a natural place, meaning a place where it naturally resides, knowing that it can sometimes also be found in a place that does not correspond to its natural place. The natural places where the elements are usually encountered are arranged in concentric spheres. At the center of the universe is the sphere of the earth; then come those of water, air, and finally fire.
Between air and fire, there are the spheres of the seven planets, namely, from the nearest to the farthest, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (an order that only roughly corresponds to the astronomical reality as known today); then comes the sphere of the fixed stars. Beyond the sphere of fire lies the primum mobile, that is, the First Mover, the engine of the universe. For the theologians of the Middle Ages and the scholastics who would adopt Aristotle’s thought, it would be God.
When the elements are not in their natural place, they tend to return to it. This explains the phenomena that the Ancients called meteorological (the meaning of this term has a broader scope than in its modern sense): rain is water from the sphere of the sky seeking to descend towards its natural place; comets are fire from the sphere of the sky seeking to rise towards its natural place; meteorites are composed of earth seeking to descend towards its natural place, and so on.
The Fifth Element
During antiquity, a fifth element was considered in addition to the four main elements. This fifth element was termed quintessence, and more modernly, it was later called ether. It would be a crystalline substance associated with the celestial world, related to the perfection and stability desired by God. Quintessence, in this theological and philosophical perspective, connects the different spheres of the cosmos; there is no void. Indeed, the concept of the absence of matter was rejected by Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, for whom “nature abhors a vacuum.”
In the Indian and esoteric traditions, there is also a fifth element, sometimes called Akasha, which means space in Sanskrit and can be linked to the Ākāsa-dhātu of Buddhist elements and the traditional Japanese element Kū (空), both of which mean space. See the article Five Elements for more details. In the Chinese Wuxing cosmology, five elements are presented: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.
Application in Biology
Just as the universe is divided into four elements, living beings are classified into four kingdoms:
- mineral (stones were considered part of living beings in the Middle Ages, if not in antiquity);
- vegetal;
- animal;
- human.
Animals are further divided into four categories based on their affiliation with one of the four elements. In the religious thought of the Middle Ages, there was the idea that the closer one gets to heaven, the closer one is to God, and the lower one descends, the closer one is to the devil and hell. At the top of the pyramid is the phoenix, a fabulous bird associated with fire, followed by ordinary birds, simple flying creatures traveling in the air, followed by fish swimming in the water, ending at the bottom of the scale with quadrupeds living on the earth.
Within the same animal category, there is also a hierarchy of beings based on the element they are closest to: birds incapable of flying and walking on the ground, like the chicken, are less esteemed than waterfowl like the duck, close to the aquatic element, itself less noble than birds of the sky like the sparrow or the hawk. (In the Middle Ages, falconry, a noble hunt par excellence, was reserved for the nobility).
Similarly, bottom-dwelling fish such as turbot are inferior to surface and swift-water fish such as salmon. Plants are generally associated with earth, but spices with fire. Such a distribution among the various elements also exists for minerals.
Application in Medicine
Greek physicians like Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) and Claudius Galen (131–201 CE) incorporated the theory of the elements, which Hippocrates supplemented with the theory of humors, systematized by Galen. This was a revival of an ancient Greek conception that established a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm, with the human body being a miniature reflection of the universe. Human physiology is governed by the elements in their transposition into an organic form, called the four humors. Each humor is dominated by a pair of qualities: yellow bile (colera in Latin) is hot and dry like fire, black bile (colera nigra) is cold and dry like earth, phlegm (phlegma) is cold and moist like water, and blood (sanguis), containing a bit of the other humors, is hot and moist like air.
Just as chaos reigns in the universe when the elements are in imbalance, the human body will become ill when one or another of the humors is in excess compared to the others. Health and illness depend on the balance of humors and their quantity. In a healthy person, the predominance of humor is called complexion and determines temperament.
Each predominant humor corresponds to a temperament: bilious or choleric for yellow bile, sanguine for blood, phlegmatic for phlegm, and melancholic for black bile. If the imbalance worsens, it leads to diseases (hot, cold, dry, or moist), which are cured by administering a remedy that restores the balance of humors. A cold and moist disease, for example, requires a hot and dry remedy (treatment by opposites), or an excess of blood will be treated with bloodletting, a treatment that will be used indiscriminately until the beginning of the modern era. There will also be proponents of treatment by similars, which can be traced back to Egyptian medicine and was initiated in the modern era by Paracelsus.
Our Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by the Hippocratic theory of humors. Many traces of it remain in everyday language: “Being in a good or bad mood.” When defining a person as “dry” or “warm,” feeling “melancholic,” or reacting with “phlegm,” one unknowingly practices Hippocratic medicine.
Application in Dietetics
Diseases resulting from humoral imbalance can be avoided through a program balancing individual complexion and the external environment. This balance primarily involves dietetics, a discipline ancillary to medicine developed, especially by Celsus and Dioscorides in the 1st century, and by Galen, applying Hippocrates’ humoral theory. For the ancient Greeks, digestion was a cooking process of foods leading to the formation of humors.
The composition of four elements and four qualities indeed applies to foods as well as to all other materials in the universe. Their classification and distribution based on complexions and temperaments have been established through a common-sense observation of food characteristics: pepper, mustard, and spices, in general, burn like fire (they are hot and dry); lettuce and peaches, along with certain fruits and vegetables, cool like water (they are cold and moist). Additionally, foods are classified between two other pairs of oppositions: cooked and raw, sweet and bitter.
The Middle Ages also hierarchized foods in the same way as living beings, depending on their proximity to the earth, water, or sky. The example of birds and fish was discussed in the biology paragraph; it can be applied to plants as well, where a beet, closer to the earth, like what was then called roots (tubers, turnips, carrots, etc.), would be more suspect and less esteemed than a cherry suspended in the air.
Food qualities range in four degrees on two main axes: those of hot and cold and those of dry and moist. This complication of the theory by the addition of degrees is the work of Galen, who gave its final architecture to the humoral theory. Honey, for example, is hot in the first degree and dry in the second degree. These qualities influence how food transforms in the body and the quality and consistency of the humors they generate in the organism. The heat of digestion transforms them into lymph, which, in turn, transforms into humors or acts on their quality and balance.
To maintain good health throughout the seasons, a balanced diet is essential. Some doctors recommend that their patients consume foods that match their temperament, while others advise eating foods contrary to their temperament. For instance, the Tacuinum Sanitatis (an Arabic text from the 11th century written by Ibn Butlan, translated into Latin in the 13th century) recommends robust red wine (hot and dry in the 2nd degree) and hare meat (hot and dry in the 2nd degree) for the elderly, phlegmatic, and melancholic individuals of cold nature. Conversely, fresh fish (cold and moist in the 3rd degree), plums, or pears (cold in the 1st degree and moist in the 2nd degree) are more suitable for choleric and sanguine individuals, as well as the young with a warm temperament.
Hippocratic medicine is cautious about raw fruits and vegetables; it is recommended to cook foods. While there is currently no tradition of Hippocratic medicine in the West, practitioners of Yunani medicine in India still claim this heritage.
Hippocratic dietetics dominated Western medicine for over 2,000 years. Despite its empirical knowledge, it was rejected with the advent of medical chemistry, which discovered vitamins, carbohydrates, lipids, and later cholesterol. However, this learned medical doctrine later entered popular culture, surviving in certain culinary practices (eating melon with cured ham at the beginning of meals, having wine-soaked pears for dessert, drinking a digestif after meals) and in some dietary advice from our grandmothers (not drinking while eating). There is also fidelity to Hippocratic principles among some theorists of healthy and vegetarian diets.
Application in Climatology
The living environment, geographical location, and climate are also subject to the play of qualities. The four cardinal points correspond to the elements as well as to complexions and temperaments. Thus, the East is hot and moist, the South is hot and dry, the North is cold and dry, and the West is cold and moist.
These considerations about cardinal points have led to the construction of an explanatory theory of geography and climate. From a European perspective, the north indeed has a cold climate, and water freezes there (solidifying removes its moist quality, explaining the north’s dryness); western regions are mainly composed of vast oceans (thus humid), and southern regions are largely made up of the vast African Sahara Desert (thus dry). As for the East, it traditionally located the earthly paradise, the source of four rivers (the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Ganges), and where a gentle warmth prevails (humid due to the rivers). It is a worldview centered on Europe, stemming from its Greek origin, to which the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden was added in the Middle Ages. This worldview is developed notably in Paracelsus’s “Meteorite.”
Prejudices from these archaic considerations have had consequences for the Western view of world populations, believed to be subject to a particular temperament based on the geographical location of their habitat (always seen in Europe as the center of the world). Southern peoples are predisposed to anger, northern peoples to melancholy, eastern peoples are rather sanguine, and western peoples are phlegmatic. Added to this are the effects of climate on physical condition: cold strengthens and heat softens; southerners are thus lazy, and northerners are hardworking. It is worth noting that the achievements of modern biology contradict these somewhat hasty assumptions: cold, by lowering body temperature, facilitates falling asleep, whereas the rise in body temperature facilitates waking.
The Structuring of Time
The theory of the four elements also applies to the structuring of time, as each of the four seasons in temperate zones corresponds to one of the classic elements. Spring is hot and moist like air, summer is hot and dry like fire, autumn is cold and dry like earth, and winter is cold and moist like water.
Thus, winter possesses the same complexion (cold and moist) as phlegm, which would explain the risks of colds occurring during this season. These considerations notably play a role in dietetics: one must counterbalance the dominant qualities of the season with foods of opposite qualities to maintain the balance of humors in the body; it was therefore strongly advised, for example, not to eat raw cucumber (cold and moist) in winter or to abuse spices (hot and dry) in summer.
In winter, when the cold and moist phlegmatic dominates, it is preferable to consume meats in sauce, cooked with warming spices (beef and pork, game); in spring, when the hot and moist sanguine dominates, it is recommended to gradually shift from boiled to roasted (poultry, lamb, kid), and start eating more green vegetables; in summer, when the hot and dry choleric dominates, it is time to eat grilled or verjuice-cooked meats (lamb and poultry) and lighter fish, and prefer cold and moist foods like melons, plums, or cherries; In autumn, when the dry and cold melancholy (or atrabilious) dominates, one should eat appetizing and acidic foods to dispel melancholy: capons, squabs, suckling pigs, and decrease wine and fruits.
Moreover, complexions change during different stages of life. Human life is divided into four ages of three periods each, totaling twelve periods (as many as months) or into three ages (if childhood and adolescence are grouped under one term: youth). The child has the complexion of spring (hot and moist), the adolescent that of summer (hot and dry), the mature adult that of autumn (cold and dry), and the elderly that of winter (cold and moist).
Women, on the other hand, are considered colder and moister than men. Nevertheless, other sources indicate that old age is of cold and dry quality. Childhood is hot and moist; adolescence is temperate; youth is hot and dry; the age of moderate consistency in heat and cold is lacking excessive dryness; and old age is cold and dry.
Of course, everything is interconnected. One must be careful about what one eats in relation to temperament, season, age, and the elements associated with the ingested animal or plant. By pushing these theories to the extreme, alchemists and physicians of the Middle Ages established their prescriptions based on astrological signs and conjunctions, etc. The best examples of connections between all these disciplines, linked by the qualities they have in common and the elements that compose and order them, are the diagrams and calendars established in the Middle Ages.
Holistic Description and Analogy
For the Greek philosophers, this theory describes the “elementary nature” of the world in general, in all its manifestations. It deals with the “nature” of matter, like modern physics or chemistry, but also leads to a classification of the “nature” of plants and animals and a classification of the nature of human characteristics, diseases, and elementary feelings.
The underlying idea behind the analogical use of the four elements is that these different objective manifestations (matter, plant, animal, disease, etc.) are structured by the same underlying reality, common to different manifestations, and that the imbalance that appears at one manifestation level can be corrected by analogy, through a specific action on another level. This same approach is still used today in many occult domains.
This holistic approach later dominated medicine, whose analytical key for centuries was to analyze elemental imbalances and correct them through prescriptions based on substance analogies. For the medical approach:
- Fire corresponds to a violent, sanguine temperament. It is associated with courage and passionate love.
- Air corresponds to a calm temperament—not very courageous but tranquil.
- Water corresponds to a variable temperament, which can be choleric as well as calm. This element is opposed to Fire, but they are the most powerful elements.
- Earth corresponds to a strong, calm temperament. This element can be strong but remains calm and contains its power. It has many dark ideas in general.
Depending on the authors, this correspondence may involve more or less pronounced astrological symbolism, the typical example being the “zodiacal man,” a correspondence between the signs and the “occult nature” of the limbs.
Correspondences to the Four Elements
The Air element is associated with the color white much more than cerulean blue, which tends to intrude, with the value of candid or immaculate white, sacred order, prayer, the priestly caste, and the superior orators. One can also associate it with the color violet, which would then correspond to spirituality. Air is a calm element, more passive than impetuous, tending to avoid conflicts.
The fire element is associated with warm colors like red, orange, or, more rarely, yellow. This element is also associated with the sanguine, the blood of the body, blood rivalries, and the fighting world of bellatores, warriors, or knights facing the fire. Fire is a choleric, unpredictable, and impetuous element, but when calm, it is a pleasant element, symbolizing passion and love.
The Water element is associated with the color blue, sometimes with shades of green. It is an element similar to Fire in many aspects because, like Fire, Water can be choleric and irritable but pleasant the rest of the time. The Earth element is associated with the color green or, more rarely, brown or gray, as well as fertility, productivity, and the primal world of laboratores, artisans, and peasants. The Earth element is morally strong but often has dark ideas.
Elements in Physics and Chemistry
Alchemical Symbolism
The foundation of alchemy is Aristotle’s elementary theory revisited by Arab-Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages, explaining, through the four elements and the four qualities, the composition of everything. The goal of alchemy is indeed to understand and reproduce the composition of things. In alchemy, the four elements do not represent components of matter since the uniqueness of matter is one of the philosophical principles of alchemy. Instead, they represent states of this unique matter, closer to the physical concept of the state of matter. These elements have an associated symbol in alchemy: Water or liquid state, Air or gaseous state, Earth or solid state, and Fire or plasma state.
However, as the theory of the four elements showed its shortcomings in explaining the infinite diversity of matter, alchemy introduced a fifth element, ether, or quintessence. The great originality of alchemy is, however, that it has added to the elements and qualities a new category: the principles. These, derived from Arabic alchemy (especially by Jabir ibn Hayyan or Geber), were initially two: Mercury (passive, cold, malleable, and volatile), a feminine principle, and Sulfur (active, hot, and hard), a masculine principle. In the 15th century, a third principle was added, definitively from Paracelsus (1493–1541): salt (which allows a body to unite sulfur and mercury and ensure the cohesion of the result), a principle of life.
However, one should not systematize an anachronistic perception of states of matter, as proposed during the mechanistic evolution of sciences in the 17th century. In the (al)chemy of the modern era, the elements still represent a plethora of qualities, properties, colors, ideal sensory perceptions, attitudes, or generic behaviors.
Modern Physics
The physics of the 19th century, and then the 20th century, confirmed the atomistic hypothesis, while discovering in the 20th century that transmutations (nuclear fission) do indeed exist in nature, which was considered impossible based on knowledge until the 19th century.
Although the physical theories of Empedocles, Aristotle, and the alchemists turned out to be erroneous, their four elements can easily be associated with the four most common states of matter: solid (earth), liquid (water), gaseous (air), and plasmatic (fire, even though it is not a plasma).
This association is unrelated to the alchemical conception in which the elements are insensible and Fire is not the flame of a candle, just as Water is not what comes out of the tap. The bodies of Earth, Water, and Air that are separated in their sensible sphere are different from the elements that nature uses in the work of generation and that compose mixed bodies. The latter are imperceptible to our senses in the mixture that nature makes of them. We can call the most solid parts ‘earth,’ the most humid ‘water,’ the most delicate ‘air,’ and the natural heat ‘fire'”.
Other References to the Elements
Five Asian Elements
In Asian cultures, five elements are generally considered:
- Godai (Japan): Chi (earth), Ka (fire), Fū (wind), Sui (water), and Kū (void);
- Wu Xing (China): Mù (wood), Huǒ (fire), Jīn (metal, sometimes gold), Shuǐ (water), and Tǔ (earth);
- Bhuta (mahābhūta) or dhātu (Buddhism): Āpo-dhātu (water), Tejo-dhātu (fire), Vāyo-dhātu (air), Paṭhavī-dhātu (earth), Ākāsa-dhātu (space), and Viññāṇa-dhātu (mind);
- Tattva (Hinduism): Āp (water), Agni (fire), Vāta (air), Prithvi (earth), and Ākāśa (ether).
Genies Inhabiting the Elements
Michael Psellos, a great Byzantine scholar of the 11th century, lists six categories of demons in a famous treatise used by Ronsard: Treatise by Dialogue on the Energy or Operation of Devils (translated in 1511). He acknowledges fiery spirits, airy spirits, earthy spirits, aquatic spirits, subterranean spirits, and dark spirits. Honorius Augustodunensis, in his Elucidarium of the 12th century, acknowledges angels, demons, and disembodied souls as spirits. He maintains that “angels have a body of ether, demons of air, humans of earth.”
Paracelsus counts seven races of soulless creatures: human-shaped but soulless and spiritless genies (inanimata) of the elements, giants and dwarfs, dwarfs on the earth. He believes in genies of the four elements. Earth, through spontaneous generation, produces dwarfs who guard treasures under the mountain; Water produces nymphs; Fire, salamanders; Air, elves. Then come giants and dwarfs born from the air but living on the earth.
“The word inanimatum designates six families of soulless men… These soulless men are firstly those of the four families who inhabit the four Elements: nymphs, daughters of water; sons of the earth, lemures, who live under the mountains; spirits of the air, gnomi; genies of fire, vulcani. The other two families are composed of men who are also born without a soul; but, like us, breathe outside the Elements. These are on the one hand giants and on the other hand dwarfs who live in the shadow of the forests, umbragines… There are beings who naturally remain within the same Element. Thus the phoenix, which stays in the fire like the mole in the earth. Do not be incredulous, I will prove it! As for the giants and dwarfs of the forest, they have our world as their dwelling. All these soulless beings are produced from seeds that come from the sky and the Elements, but without the soil of the earth… They come into the world like insects formed in the mire [through spontaneous generation].”
Jean Wier, a specialist in witchcraft, classifies demons in his On the Tricks of Demons and on Incantations (1563) according to their elemental nature (fire, water, air, earth, subterranean) and according to their habitat (from the four cardinal points, diurnal, nocturnal, sylvan, mountainous, rural, domestic).
Henri de Montfaucon de Villars, in a superb novel, The Count of Gabalis or Conversations on Occult Sciences (1670), correlates demons and elements and simplifies Psellus, continuing Paracelsus. Sylphs are of air, undines of water, gnomes of earth, salamanders of fire.
“The air is full of an innumerable multitude of peoples [the Sylphs] of human appearance, a little proud in appearance but docile in effect: great lovers of sciences, subtle, officious to the wise, and enemies of fools and ignorants. Their women and daughters are male beauties, such as the Amazons are depicted… Know that the seas and rivers are inhabited just like the air; the ancient Sages have named Undines or Nymphs this kind of people… The earth is filled almost to the center with Gnomes [dwarfs], people of small stature, guardians of treasures, mines, and gemstones. These are ingenious, friends of man, and easy to command. They provide the children of the Wise with all the money they need and ask little for the price of their service than the glory of being commanded. Their wives, the Gnomides, are small but very pleasant, and their costume is very curious… As for the salamanders, fiery inhabitants of the fire region, they serve the philosophers.” — (p. 45–48).
| Creature | Element according to Paracelsus | Element according to the Abbot of Villars |
|---|---|---|
| Mermaid | Water | Water |
| Gnome | Earth | Earth |
| Salamander | Fire | Fire |
| Phoenix | Fire | |
| Elf | Air | |
| Sylph | Air | |
| Nymph | Water |
Astrology
Astrologers who align with the thoughts of Carl Gustav Jung associate the four elements with the four Jungian types: Fire with Intuition, Water with Feeling, Air with Thinking, and Earth with Sensation. However, Jung, who knew medieval symbolism well, never claimed to be able to link his characterology to the four elements. The more commonly accepted correspondence by astrologers is: Fire/Motivation, Water/Affect, Air/Cognition, and Earth/Perception.
Tarot
In divinatory tarot, the colors of the low cards are directly associated with the four elements: cups represent water, swords represent air, wands represent fire, and pentacles represent earth. These four elements can be recognized on the Fool card (the wand is in his hand, and the rest is on the table). This correspondence directly follows the instruments of the magician (dagger, wand, cup, and pentagram) supposed to master the corresponding elements in ceremonial magic.
