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[Nungali]

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[maldor]

What is meant by the "elements"?

 

Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Symbolic in what way ? What is Agrippa getting at here ?

[Zhongyongdaoist]

What is meant by the "elements"?

 

Fire, Earth, Air and Water. Symbolic in what way ? What is Agrippa getting at here ? (Emphasis mine, ZYD)

Nothing symbolic at all.  In Agrippa's worldview these were fundamental explanatory categories in nature, which included physics, alchemy, psychology etc.  This post is a useful preliminary to cross cultural elemental study and with the staggerring difference between Agrippa's worldview and ours studying him is a cross cultural study:

 

Contrary to what has been said above it is exactly the lack of rigorous “intellectualism” that is the problem in discussions like this. Let me take what has been said here:

 

 

Considering, however, that the elements in Taoism aren't even the same as the Yogic ones (they exclude air and akasha an implement wood and metal as elements) . . .

As a starting point. First I would like to point out that neither is the same as the system of elements introduced by Plato and Aristotle, but for the sake of developing the discussion I will use that of Aristotle, which unambiguously contains five elements and is often conflated with the yogic one. Second, I would point out the analogical resemblance here to what I said about alchemy and chemistry here:

(Alchemy and chemistry) . . .are two paradigms that have a common set of experiences, but even this common set is interpreted completely differently . . . (Emphasis added, ZYD)

The shared “elements” are earth, water and fire, the Chinese system (It is common to Confucianism too by the way.) adds to these two metal and wood, the Indian system (It is shared by Buddhism also.) has air and akasha, and the system of Aristotle share's air with the Indian system, but has ether instead of space.

 

Now aside from this each of these systems creates “models” of these elements and their interactions and these models are a fundamental part of a paradigm. Models are logical/systemic structures that map out a set of relationships between the elements of the model, thus the Chinese system has the generation/destruction cycle as part of its model. It also has a probably older model based on the four seasons and the earth as center, further behind that is the primary systemic substrate the Trigrams. I am already in a sense simplifying for the sake of discussion and will really not go into the Astronomical cycles which may be part of the background, etc., but limit myself to Chinese five element theory for this discussion. As with Alchemy and Chemistry all of this background means that the apparently common elements are conceptualized very differently within the logical/systemic model of the “Five Elements”, than they are in either the Indian or Aristotelian systems.

 

Despite their similar names, the four elements earth, water, air and fire are also conceived of very differently between the Indian System and Aristotle. Without going to much into detail, I will base this description on the account given by Rama Prasad in The Science of Breath … Nature's Finer Forces, a work published by the Theosophical Society and usually referred to just as Nature's Finer Forces. This book was very influential and was the vehicle by which the “Tattvas” (or tattwas) entered the Golden Dawn system and eventually formed what we might call the “new age” version of elemental theory.

 

In this theory the “elements” are viewed as vibrations which form “solitons” in five standard shapes, each with different properties. These five shapes are the primary tattvas which can be combined, but that is outside of the scope of the discussion. Each of these five have different attributes of which we will focus on these five; to akasha, space, to air, movement, to fire, expansion, to water, contraction, and to earth “cohesive resistance”. These are all well known to people who have studied Bardon for example. Now all of this exists within a bigger context, just as Chinese elementary theory does.

 

Now let us compare this to Aristotle. In Aristotle all manifestation is because of “substantial forms”, which provide all of the attributes of a manifest thing. For the elements the there are four attributes, two primary, heat and cold, and two secondary, moisture and dryness. Every manifest thing on earth will at least to a certain extent manifest these qualities, in their purest form, Fire is hot and dry, Air warm and moist, Water is cold and moist and Earth is cold and dry. Everything that exists on earth will be more or less hot or dry, etc. whatever else it may be. Each of these also has a “natural motion”, Fire and Air rise and Earth and Water descend, that is why the elements have divided themselves up into layers surrounding the earth

 

The fifth, Ether is in a sense the odd man “out”, who does not fit into this because it is not part of the earth, but of the heavens. I won't go much into Ether's qualities, but is natural motion is Circular and is the “cause”of the “circular” motion of the Planets and stars. All of this also exists in a bigger context just as Chinese and Indian element theory does.

 

Now most people just stop here and say, well they can't all be right, but the conclusion to which I came very early, like before I was twenty, was that they could all be right to a certain extent, by which I mean, that if we look at their logical/systemic forms as being like a lens that when it brings somethings into focus, but blurs other things, or like a color filter that separates out "information" about a single color, each of these might be viewed as complementary systems that bring out different aspects of reality, just as the experiments of quantum mechanics brings out the wavelike and particlelike properties of “particles” on very small scale. For some of these it may even be possible to do what I mentioned here in regard to alchemy and chemistry:

On the other hand I think it quit possible to create a "meta-chemistry" which could unify them both, but it would be necessary to completely rethink chemistry integrating the ideas of formal and final causes, i.e. the chemical elements as being mathematical forms instantiated in chemical phenomena. This could open up new areas of investigation which might prove useful and reveal a whole set of new phenomena, but would be a very complex process. The world view of Alchemy would contribute more to this than the present worldview of chemistry would. (Emphasis added, ZYD)

 

Which would be like bringing together the results of a red filter and a green filter and a blue filter (RGB) to create a full color picture. This is type of rigorous intellectualism that I have pursued for decades and because it has always been pursued as complementary to practice, rather than being mere mental self-abuse, it has been very fruitful.

 

 

 

I hope this is helpful. I will post more if I have time.