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Earth

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Origin 360 BCE to 320 BCE

Earth is one of the four classical Western elements, the element of matter, body, and the practical. Its qualities are cold and dry: stable, heavy, and enduring, the densest and most fixed of the four. In astrology it forms the earth triplicity of Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn, signs of steadiness, usefulness, and material mastery, and in tarot it is the suit of Coins or Pentacles, the suit of work, wealth, health, and the tangible world. In the doctrine of the four humors it corresponds to the melancholic temperament, ruled by black bile, marked by caution, patience, and reflection. In the Golden Dawn scheme of directions it is placed in the North, the region of cold and midnight, and its season is autumn and the turn toward winter, the harvest and the settling of the year. Earth grounds spirit into form and usefulness, giving substance, structure, and reliability. It is the foundation on which the other elements build.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
360 BCE to 320 BCE 1Tradition: Aristotelian physics: the four elements and the quintessence
Origin Period
500 BCE to 400 BCE 1Tradition: Greek natural philosophy: the four roots of Empedocles
Place of Origin
Akragas in Sicily, where Empedocles wrote, and the philosophical schools of the Aegean and of Athens. 1
Attributed Author / Compiler
Empedocles of Akragas, who names four roots; Aristotle, who assigns each its pair of qualities and adds the fifth, heavenly substance. 1
Origin of the Name
Old English eorthe, a Germanic word with no accepted root outside the Germanic languages. 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Cold and dry. Earth is the heaviest of the four and moves naturally downward; the qualities, not any symbolism of stability or fertility, are what the physics assigns. 1Tradition: Aristotelian physics: the four elements and the quintessence
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Earth in the Western Scheme

Earth is one of the four classical elements of Greek natural philosophy, and in the Aristotelian pairing of qualities it is cold and dry, the heaviest of the four, sinking to the centre and standing for the solid, the stable and the material. It is the element of the body, the physical world and the practical, of everything fixed, fertile and enduring. The tradition assigns the three earth signs, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn, to it, signs conventionally read as grounded, practical and concerned with the tangible.

In the humoral medicine of Hippocrates and Galen earth corresponds to black bile and the melancholic temperament, cold and dry, prone to heaviness and reflection. In Western ritual magic earth is the element of the north, associated with the pentacle or disc, with silence, and with manifestation and the body; its opposite is airy fire and its complement watery moisture. The later tarot attribution of earth to the suit of Coins or Pentacles is a Golden Dawn systematisation of 1888. Earth's enduring symbolism is of stability, fertility, patience and the material ground of things.

Sources The Presocratic PhilosophersG. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield with The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

Earth in Western Practice

Earth in the Western working traditions carries a set of attributions that belong to particular systems rather than to the element in the abstract, and keeping them attached to their systems is what stops the correspondences collapsing into contradiction.

In astrology earth is a triplicity: Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn, three signs a hundred and twenty degrees apart. The grouping is in Ptolemy and it is how an element enters a chart at all. In the tarot, earth is conventionally the suit of Pentacles, called Coins or Disks in other decks, and the shift of name is worth noting because the disk is a shield and the coin is money, and the two readings pull the suit in different directions.

In the Golden Dawn system earth is placed in the north, given the pentacle as its working implement and the archangel Uriel as its regent, with the colour black or the citrine, olive, russet and black of the composite scale. That synthesis dates from the late nineteenth century. It is coherent, it is documented, and it is not ancient, which matters when a modern source presents it as immemorial.

Earth is the element the tradition most often treats as the sum of the others, the point where fire, air and water arrive at a body. That reading is genuinely old, since Aristotle gives earth the two heaviest qualities, cold and dry, and places it at the centre toward which everything else falls. It also does a good deal of work in later occult writing, where earth is the condition of anything actually being finished.

Sources The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie with TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Asia, Continents

The earth triplicity governs the southeast quarter of the inhabited world.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy
Black, Colors

The Golden Dawn gives Earth no single hue. Earth takes the four colours of Malkuth, citrine, olive, russet and black, so black is one quarter of the attribution rather than the whole of it. Summaries that print a flat black for Earth have simplified the order's own scheme.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie
Brown, Colors

Russet, the brown quarter of the four Malkuth colours, belongs to the Golden Dawn's Earth colouring alongside citrine, olive and black. No one of the four stands for Earth alone; the point of the set is that the lowest sphere is mixed rather than pure.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie
Cypress, Plants

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the cypress to Earth, matching its Saturnian rulership.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham
Empedocles, Historical Figures

One of the four roots of his physics, the earliest statement of the four element scheme the West went on to inherit.

Primrose, Plants

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the primrose to Earth.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham
The Eighteenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Eighth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Eleventh Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Fifteenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Fifth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Fourteenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Fourth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Ninth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Seventeenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Seventh Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Sixteenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Sixth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Tenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Third Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Thirteenth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
The Twelfth Call, Enochian Calls
Source A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some SpiritsJohn Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon
Tulip, Plants

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the tulip to Earth, which reads the bulb rather than the flower.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham
Uriel, Archangels
Yin, Polarities

Earth, one of the two heavy and falling elements that make up the feminine signs.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy
Zelator (Golden Dawn), Initiatory Grades

Zelator is the earth grade of the Golden Dawn's elemental series, matching Malkuth, which the order's tables give to earth.

Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

Related To

Earth, Tattvas

The tattva Earth is paired with the Western element Earth in the tattva work the Golden Dawn took into its curriculum.

Source The Golden DawnIsrael Regardie
Sources
1. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition
Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012Aristotle: physics and cosmologyView the Source
The Presocratic Philosophers
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, Cambridge University Press, 1983Empedocles and the four roots; earth as cold and dry
Ancient Medicine
Vivian Nutton, Routledge, 2013black bile and the melancholic temperamentView the Source
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton, Oxford University Press, 1999the Golden Dawn (1888) elemental attribution of the tarot suits and ritual quartersView the Source

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