Magick For Beginners: Elemental Directions

Being the first in a series of blatherings about topics which keep cropping up and confusing people when they look into Matters Esoteric, for the Elucidation of the Novice, the Amusement of the Adept, and the Inspiration of the Speculative Fiction Author.

As any budding witch, magician or estate agent will tell you, directions are Important. Most Western magickal traditions use some form of element-to-cardinal-direction correspondence, though as ever there is precious little agreement and endless internet arguements over which direction signifies which element. Newcomers to any magickal practice tend to get very worked up and confused about the specifics here; to what extent they can be said to really matter is pretty much down to one's individual practices and theories of How It All Works. Personally, I don't believe that there is One True Way of assigning elements to directions, though certain arrangements can be seen as being associated with particular assumptions about the microcosm and the macrocosm, and how it all fits together.

Most Western traditions derive ultimately from the Greek philosopher Empodocles, via Aristotle, in their use of elements. By this system, all matter is divided into the four root elements of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, with a fifth element, Aether (most often "spirit" or "magic" in modern traditions) representing that which is not of the physical world. Aristotle theorised that the unchanging stars were composed of Aether, as all things on earth could be seen to ultimately degrade; note here the similarities with the various gnostic and pseudo-gnostic ideas about the corruption of matter and eternal nature of the spirit.

These four elements were arranged, as seen in the following diagram, by two measures of their sensible characteristics, which is to say their heat or coolness, and the wet or dryness. This, naturally enough, produces an arrangement which sees fire as being the opposite of water, and air the opposite of earth.

There is, of course, nothing remotely sensible about the Aether

There are, of course, other schema of elements, the Chinese Wu Xing (consisting of wood, fire, earth, metal and water) being a prominent one - though it is worth noting that the wu xing should not be thought of as being component parts of the universe as the classical elements were, but rather as being representative of fundamental processes that described relationships and interactions between differing phenomena. More modernly, one might think of the elements of the periodic table; or of electrons, protons and neutrons; or of the various flavours of quarks - the underlying concept is not altogether dissimilar (and leads to the idea of Opening the Watchtower of Bottom, which should not be confused with any of the OTO higher grades...) Equally, one could consider the four classical elements to be archetypal representations of states of matter - solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma.

So, naturally enough, the "classic" arrangement of elements that crops up everywhere, is this:

(The arrow is pointing North in all the following diagrams)

Wait, what?

So, this is the standard, "microcosmic" arrangement that is ultimately derived from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, best known as the arrangement of the elemental archangels in their pentagram ritual (though, incidentally and like many things involving the Golden Dawn, the pentagram ritual is A Bit More Complicated Than That). Alex Sumner makes a few good arguements about the origin of this arrangement - that it can be tied to the arrangement of the winds according to Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, or that it is tied in to the rather obscure "Adonai Forumla" of notable eccentric and spirit-chess enthusiast Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one-time leader of the Golden Dawn.

Crowley aficionados will also recognise this as one of the sets of directional associations that are used in Liber Resh, his Egyptian-ish ritual in praise of the sun in its four stations across the sky. In a way, this can be quite easily rationalised - Air is the sun at dawn, rising into the sky; Fire is the sun at its height; Water is the sun as it sets and fades into the underworld; and Earth the darkness and stillness of midnight.

Another tradition gives the following:

What the hell's going on here?

This is derived from a couple of sources, most notably traditional astrology. Agrippa listed this arrangement in his Second Book of Occult Philosophy; it derives ultimately from the position of the cardinal signs of astrology (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn respectively, working counter-clockwise from Fire in the East, following the order of their rising above the Horizon from the Spring Equinox). The Golden Dawn also used this in their hexagram ritual in certain circumstances (primarily when within the Vault of the Adepts); it could be said that this arrangement represents macrocosmic forces, rather than microcosmic ones - those forces which are of the stars, rather than extant upon the earth.

A somewhat more obscure, used by some Thelemic authors including the wonderfully-named Rodney Orpheus, uses a model based on the fixed signs of the zodiac that derives from another one of Crowley's rituals, Liber V vel Reguli. For reasons that may best be described as "perverse" and "complex", this places the viewpoint of the magician as being upside-down in the centre of the ring of the zodiac, facing Taurus (Earth), which is assumed to be the East. This results, naturally enough, in Scorpio (Water) being placed to the West, and the apparent direction of the zodiac as running clockwise; Leo (Fire) thus ends up in the South, and Aquarius (Air) in the North:

Just to make things more confusing, by Thelemic convention East does not actually refer to East, but rather in the direction of Boleskin House, a property on the shores of Loch Ness which was once owned by Aleister Crowley (and later by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame). Interestingly, Boleskin burned down a few weeks ago, a fact which will likely launch a thousand increasingly ludicrous conspiracy theories. In practice, this means that using the above arrangement results in a variable position of the four elements depending on where one happens to be on the globe, which could be argued was quite intentional on Crowley's part; Lon Milo DuQuette suggests in The Magick of Aleister Crowley that the counter-intuitive placement of the elements in the Reguli ritual was designed to deliberately disjoint the magician from the old geocentric model of the universe that is intrinsically implied by the Golden Dawn's microcosmic arrangement, in favour of a heliocentric arrangement in which the magician identifies with the Sun - a perennial theme of Crowley's philosophy.

Most Wiccan groups tend to use the Golden Dawn arrangement but rationalise it in more naturalistic ways; considering that most of Gardnerian Wicca is an assortment of GD/OTO rituals with the serial numbers filed off, with a certain amount of Old Gerald's sexual pecadillos scribbled in the margins and then gradually crossed out by various editors and revisionists, this is hardly surprising, but that is a rant for another post entirely.

Other pagan traditions use a variety of different arrangements; one of the most common is the system used by Robert Cochrane's Clan of Tubal Cain, which has been adopted by various practitioners of non-Garnderian traditional witchcraft. This system is, ironically, the closest to the arrangement that is implied by Aristotle:

There are various interpretations of this arrangement, the most common of which is to consider North to be representative of celestial realms, being that the Northern celestial pole is consistently above the Northern horizon, and the South being representative of the chthonic underworld, the Southern celestial pole being below the Southern horizon. The nodes of Fire and Water are assigned to the points of dawn and dusk, and can be seen as representing the birth and death of the sun.

Most or all of the above applies best in the Northern hemisphere. There are differing schools of thought around the application of these theories in the Southern hemisphere - some authorities, usually of the Goldeny-Dawny-type, argue that there should be no difference, as when one is conducting a ritual which uses the elemental correspondences, one is not actually in Basildon, or Alice Springs, or wherever, but in the metaphysical space implied by the Temple - and so the energies that one is dealing with are archetypal, and based on tradition. Others, particularly the more earth-focused pagan traditions, argue that if one is connecting to the energies of the Earth, location is far more important than any archetypal form.

I would generally advise keeping an open mind on the whole issue, including whether or not any of this matters one jot. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly good maxim for everything when it comes to magick.