The Five Elements

Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.

Earth   (East)   (Represents Emotion and Possessions)  The Mother Goddess, the Earth is the organism that is life.  And to us, Life is a miracle, an anomoly in a lifeless universe.   The Earth is living.  It feeds us, gives us materials, beauty, terrible destruction and a place to hold us underneath the sky.  We are part of the cycle of living, our own bodies designed to deteriorate into the earth once more.  Perhaps there is resurrection in the sense that molecules of air and earth and water continue to move.  Maybe a molecule in you was once a molecule in (name your favorite historical, dead, figure.)  The seasons affect the earth, and we watch, helpless to the weather and its demands.  Rain, rain, rain.  Summertime's fecundity, a thousand shades of green.  Autumn cracks open with vibrant reds and other tungsten colors as the plants die.  The Wheel of the Year turns, cycling towards death and rebirth.  The Earth sustains those cycles for us.  The Earth is abundant.

Air   (West)   (Represents the Intellect)  The West Winds, the air is the magical component we need for life's animation to occur.  Without the link between air and Earth, all life would die.  The air moves in breezes and storms and it feeds the flame.  It holds and releases water.  It allows the snow.  Incense smoke carries a prayer through the air to the heavens.  The sky is in itself an abstraction we live beneath.  Where does it end?

Fire   (South)   (Represents Creative Energies)  The Fire, the essence of the God, Power, has to be controlled, sometimes cannot be controlled.  Fire rises from friction, and so it is associated with more warlike, Horned-God power.  It lights balefire, incense, sage, and candles.  We must extinguish flame and create it.  It transforms earth substances such as frankinscense into air substances.

Water   (North)   (Represents Psychic Energies)  The Water Goddess, the other sustainer of life, aquatic life.  Another universe of creatures, just as we on earth, live in the element of water.  The water sustains our bodies, our bodies are almost entirely made up of water.  Water falls upon us as rain or snow, it feeds the earth which needs its drink just as we do.

Akasha is the fifth element, or Spirit.  This leads us to the questions of natural science versus the essence of philosophical thought.  This is the element of the heart and mind.  But, what is the heart?  What is the mind?