The Four Elements of a Fulfilling Life
Introduction to the 5-part series on Earth, Air, Fire, and Water
- EARTH
2. AIR
3. FIRE
4. WATER
The Four Elements model from antiquity has a value in promoting a happy and healthy life far beyond what most people today would think. In the ancient Persian, Greek and then the alchemical tradition, it was thought that all matter was composed of these Four Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The idea was that if we could just figure out how to master and harmonize these elements, we could perform miraculous feats such as healing illness, prolonging life, transforming physical substances (such as base metals into gold), or making magical tools (such as perpetually burning lamps). The symbolism in each case is one of progression from something unhealthy to something healthy, from something worse to something better, or from something fleeting to something lasting.
Often the discussion of the Four Elements in these ancient texts revolved around how they represented the essential elements out of which our reality was composed and how they could be combined to create things. This concept echos down to today in the Periodic Table and Minecraft crafting. Looking to the past we see that across traditions, there are similarities about where these Four Elements came from.
Abstractly speaking, you begin with nothing, and then, somehow, nothing, or zero, becomes two. The Christian and Hebrew bible opens with the words “In the beginning, God created heaven [i.e. air] and earth.” You have nothing, and then you have two: in this case, heaven and earth. Lao Tzu, in the very first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, writes about the duality that marked the beginning of the universe, he writes that heaven and earth “are the same but diverge in name as they issue forth.”
Once you had two (for example, day and night, or light and dark), the two cycled back and forth from one to the other. Two then became four because with this cycling people imagined a circle or experienced a loop and saw the natural four quarters or points of top, bottom, left and right. The four manifests in many ways. For example, thinking of the 24 hour cycle of the earth’s rotation, we see the extremes of the darkest night and the brightest day separated by dawn and dusk. These are the traditional four key points of the day. Four is a sacred number in nature, not just in the four parts to a day. We could just as well be talking about the four cardinal directions or the four seasons of the year or the four stages of a human lifetime. And the way many of these ancient sages thought about Earth and Air transitioning was through or via Fire and Water.
Often these sacred four were linked together. For example, the Cherokee tribe in North America linked Earth with North, Air with East, Fire with South and Water with West. In the ancient mythical way of telling it, the four then multiplied into the all the infinite complexity that we witness around us in the world today
As we all know, this vision of four elements has blossomed into a Periodic Table with 118 elements, not four, and alchemy into chemistry. But the original vision has a symbolic value that can have real impact on the very things these ancient practitioners proposed. That is the focus of this series of articles: the Four Elements as a model to enhance the health of the body and mind, the length and quality of ones life, and even on the ability to control the physical world with our minds. Sadly, these very real health benefits (and possibly real supernatural powers) have all been dismissed along with the framework itself, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if Eden isn’t a real place, and you believe that talk of ‘the soul’ and ‘enlightenment’ is unscientific fantasy, understanding the lessons of the Four Elements is of enormous practical value, completely apart from the mystical whoo-whoo-ness of it all.
We live in a world of matter and gravity, of space-time and light. Many traditions believe that being born into a this physical realm of ours, and into a human body in particular, is an extraordinary gift. People of this school of thought believe that it is in the school of life as a corporeal form that our soul or true self can learn the lessons it needs to advance towards mastery or progress towards enlightenment. This life of ours is the gateway on the road of return to the Garden of Eden, as it were. Even if Eden isn’t a real place, and you believe that talk of ‘the soul’ and ‘enlightenment’ is unscientific fantasy, understanding the lessons of the Four Elements is of enormous practical value, completely apart from the mystical whoo-whoo-ness of it all. The benefits that accompany an understanding of the elements are the best that life has to offer: peace, joy, abundance, health, fulfilment — in a word all the gifts that a life built on love has to offer us. What could be the connection between this obscure, ostensibly outdated and pseudo-scientific Four Elements theory and living a good life?
The symbolism, though simple on the surface, has an extraordinary depth. And this depth can be mined for lessons on how to live a better life. This is perhaps why it occupied so much attention in ancient masters ranging from Aristotle to Newton and Roger Bacon to Paracelsus.
How can this be? This symbolic language of Earth, Air, Fire and Water sounds so dated to minds conditioned by Western science. Yet somehow it arose in disparate locations and epochs, persisted for millennia and was employed by some of the greatest minds humanity produced. These facts suggest that we not dismiss the framework out of hand but rather investigate whether it has real power and truth and whether this truth has practical application to our life. That is what this series does.
The series is structured as this introduction followed by four articles, each part corresponding, naturally, to each element (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water). We can think of mastering the Four Elements as a process of learning the lessons life has to teach us in each of the four essential realms. And through this mastery we can achieve some of those original benefits the alchemists of old foretold.
In summary, the value of this four-part model is as follows:
- EARTH: It begins with an understanding that as humans, we are composed of matter and occupy a physical form in a world of energy, physical forces, phenomena and change. This place we occupy in the material world is symbolized by the Earth Element and it is our first task to achieve at least a basic level of mastery of this element. Most of us do that naturally via our growth through adolescence but somewhere along the line we get stuck or become confused.
- AIR: Once we have mastered the Earth Element sufficiently, our bodies are in a position to acquire knowledge and think rationally. These insubstantial capacities of mind are symbolized by the Air Element.
- FIRE: With a well-functioning body and a mind, we are ready to be presented with the initiations of aging, sickness, trauma or suffering and dissatisfaction of whatever kind. Struggling through these initiations, as symbolized by Fire, is what occupies our attention for most of our life.
- WATER: But the great promise of this model is that we can have the fire of these struggles extinguished by Water, which is the symbol for intuition, baptism, and, by extension, love. And through this reawakening into love, we discover the benefits of a good life that were promised long ago by the alchemists of old.
So in this series we are going to look at each of these stages in the progression towards a life built on love and see what they have to teach us.
You can read them in order or jump to the one that interests you the most.
You can also listen to a couple of podcasts of talks I have given covering similar material.
For an entirely different (and quite esoteric!) take on the Four Elements based on the teachings of the Hindu classic, The Bhagavad Gita, you can listen to the reading of Rudolf Steiner’s 1905 lecture on the subject:
For more information you can visit the Happy Mind website.
ZR.
