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The Elemental system was originally a trinity – Fire, Water, and Air. In this fashion they appear in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, (1604), directly related to the Three-Person’d God – “Sint mihi dei Archerontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete!” This trinity is there in the Cabala; ALP (t), MEM (n), and SHIN (a), the Mother letters, the only three letters in the Hebrew alphabet that have values in the hundreds.
But the fourfold symbolism seems to be fundamental to human thought - The four Corners of the World; the four winds that blow across it; the four points of the compass. The stage of the whole world, the chessboard of existence, is a square, as is the Veil of Maya.
Ezekiel, Ch 1; “…they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.” It will be noted that the Sphinx is a combination of these four animals – the body of an ox, the tail and claws of a lion, the wings of an eagle and the head of a man.
James Joyce puns on these identifications in Finnegans Wake; Marcus Lyons, Johnny McDougal, Matt Gregory, and Luke Tarpey, the four old men who stand at the corners of Earwicker’s bed.
By the time that Goethe published his version of the Faust legend in 1808, the three-fold elemental system that had originated with the Alchemists had been almost entirely replaced with the more familiar four, which originated from Empedocles in the 5th Century BC. Immediately before summoning Mephistopheles in his study, Faust recites the names of the elemental spirits, the mythical creatures which symbolise them:
“Scorching SALAMANDER, burn,
NYMPH of WATER, twist and turn,
Vanish, SYLPH, to thy far home,
Labour vex thee, drudging GNOME.”
According to Aristotle, the elements each embodied a certain quality. They were described in terms their wetness and their coldness. So, Fire is hot and dry: Water is the exact opposite, cold and wet; Air was seen as cold and dry; while Earth was hot and wet.
Further, they relate each to one of the Four Humors, of the Greek physician Galen (2nd Century AD). According to this theory, the four Humors by which a person may be affected are Melancholic (sad & pensive) which relates to Earth; Choleric (angry & passionate) which was Fire; Sanguine (ardent & hopeful) was Air; and Phlegmatic (sluggish indifference) was Water.
The Cross, especially equal-armed versions such as the Templar cross and the Swastika, is the symbol of the balancing of four elements, as the Star of David is the symbol of the balancing of two. Jung’s writing on the quaternical structures in the mandala, another symbol of unity, will be illuminating here.
In the heavily coded Alchemical texts they used many different systems of terms to mean the Elements, and also the various stages of the Great Work.
Elemental imagery is clear in the suits of both the Tarot deck and the more familiar modern deck. In fact, the names of suits of the modern deck are believed to be a corrupted version of the more obviously symbolic Tarot suits. So, the Wands, representing Fire, became Clubs, via the French, baton; and the Swords, for Air, became Spades; Cups became Hearts, both Female symbols, representing Water; and Pentacles, sometimes called Disks or Coins and representing Earth, became Diamonds. Elemental symbolism also appears in several of the Trump designs themselves; for example, Atu 21, The Universe, has one of the Evangelical emblems in each of its corners, and Atu 1, called The Juggler or The Magician, shows a man with possession of all four elemental symbols.
This probably relates to the idea that the suits refer to the four functions of Man. The Magical Weapons, the Wand, Sword, Cup and Pentacle, respectively represent the Will, the Reason, the Understanding, and the Body. Of these four, only Understanding may be unclear - it refers to the female aspect of mind (intuition, refined emotion and holistic comprehension), as opposed to the male aspect Reason (cold dissecting logic, detail). It is by mastery of these four faculties that the Magician is able to elicit change in the Universe.
The Buddha Gautama described the Four Noble Truths that lead to Nirvana.
In William Blake’s complex mystical cosmology, this four-fold World system is named the Zoas. These four gods are the “four mighty Ones in every Man” and have a number of different correspondences, summarised below.
Element Function Direction Sense Art Continent
Tharmas Water Body West Taste Painting America
Urizen Air Reason South Sight Architecture Africa
Luvah Fire Passion East Smell Music Asia
Los/ Earth Imagination North Hearing Poetry Europe
Urthona
As can be seen, these attributions only occasionally match the traditional ones, for instance, in putting Reason with Air. Blake’s attributions should be taken as a contribution to a constantly evolving system, not as a contradiction of a long-established dogma.
In the Cabala, the Quaternical system is the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, commonly pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah. In Hebrew vuvh, Yod Heh Vau Heh, it neatly ties up all the traditional elemental symbolism with the Neo-Platonic creation myth.
Each Hebrew letter has a symbol meaning in itself: Yod (h) is male, the Father, representing Force or Will, and in this interpretation signifies the initial Divine Spark, the Will of God. On the Tree of Life it is the second Sephiroth, Chokmah. “God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” (Gen. 1:3). It corresponds to Fire, the Wand.
Next is Heh (j), female, which is the Mother and signifies fertility and form. It corresponds to Water and the Cup, and such symbolism is also seen in Genesis – “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Gen 1:2) It is also the Sephiroth Binah.
Their union produces Vau (u), the Son, which corresponds to the Sepharoth Tiphareth, and to the Sword. It represents Air, and it can be noted that Air is, like the Son, a union of it’s parents – it has the dryness of Fire, but the coldness of Water.
Finally comes the final Heh, which is the Daughter. She is the Earth, the Sepharoth Malkuth, and the Pentacles. She completes the cycle, completing the polarity below to match the polarity above.
This Father-Mother-Son-Daughter system is analogous to the Gnostic creation myth –the Father is En Soph, the True Living God, from whom issues the Mother, Sophia. She, in turn, produces the Son, the Demiurge, or Creator, who created the World of Men, represented by the Daughter. The system is also present in the court cards, the Kings, Queens, Princes, and Princesses, of the Tarot deck.
The Pythagoreans illustrated the importance of four in a symbol called the Tetractys (Left). It contains the ratios 2:3, 3:2, and 4:3, their Holy Diversity, which were important to their ideas about the intervals of the octave. “Progress from oneness to the number four” wrote Pythagoras, “and the ten emerges, the Mother of all things.”
Scientific parallels include the three dimensions of space plus one of time within which all of our Universe is framed. Alfred Douglas describes the four Evangelical emblems as “the quaternary of powers which ensure the stability of the cosmic processes.” (The Tarot, 1972) Thus, they might neatly represent the four fundamental forces which, according to modern Physics, operate in the Universe – the Electromagnetic, Gravity, Weak Nuclear, and Strong Nuclear forces. |
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