Clear Cosmology: The Elements - Quintessence

Spirit. Soul. Aether. Azoth. Prana. Quintessence, the fifth element.

Due to the nature of our research, we find ourselves obliged to start our exploration of the elements with this most misunderstood feature of ancient phenomenology.

Obligatory "Leeloo multipass" reference.

Because this topic is the subject of so many jokes, we’ll have to get them all out of the way.

What isn’t Quintessence?

Quintessence is not love. Quintessence is not family. Quintessence is undoubtedly not the friends we made along the way.

The talking horse program lied to you.

What are the Qualities of Quintessence?

Unlike the other four elements, Quintessence is not easy to relate because it does not have a discrete material correlate. 

This presents a contradiction because quintessence is both the non-material element and is present in all matter.

What is Quintessence?

Quintessence - the element of animation.

There is no standardized image for quintessence, though it is often represented
with a circle, an eight-spoked wheel (indicating motion), a spiral, and the
Seal of Light created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

What does that even mean?

All matter in the universe is potentially animate in the minds of the ancients. That is, it has an essence that governs its actions. Any material that acts in the world has animation.

In Pythagorean thought, this element was a fluidic substance, an etheric field that filled all things in the universe, not unlike the Force in Star Wars.

All four material elements are regarded as having more or less animation relative to their densities, as seen in the vertical model described in our Four Elements article.

Earth has little to no animation,* but it cannot be denied that water flows and the sea tosses, nor that the wind blows, and that fire consumes and dances and casts light and imparts its animation substances subject to its heat.

Animation, however, is a more sophisticated concept than more movement/less movement. It has two dimensions of consideration that are relevant to our research. These are the anima/animata (particular/general) axis and the masculine/feminine (shaping/generating) axis.

*Compiler's Note: The subject of animated earth will be covered in the *Earth* article.

Anima/Animus

You, dear reader, may already have some of your own ideas about what a “soul” is. Perhaps you think of it as the mind of a person that survives past death, the origin of ghosts and demons, and all manner of supernatural things. Perhaps you’re an atheist who thinks that souls are made-up nonsense.

Well, you’re wrong in both cases.

Both of these positions come from a misunderstanding of what a soul is. Even since antiquity, so much has been hitched to the term that a very simple, easy-to-grasp idea has been buried in ambiguities and associations.

Let’s tackle the disbelief in souls:

    1) Go outside. 

    2) Find a bug. 

Does the bug move? If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

If it isn’t moving, it doesn’t have a soul. Because it’s dead.

Let's do another:

    1) Find a houseplant. 

    2) Does it photosynthesize? 

    3) Does it grow? 

If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.

Yes, even this thing. Unless it's plastic.

A soul, or animus, is simply the animating force of a discrete thing. You have a soul. Your dog has a soul. Your ficus plant has a soul.

Does a thing act under its own power? Does it respond to forces acting upon it? Does it move, grow, or shrink?  Then it has an animus. The soul is the animating principle of the particular, simple as.

What about-

The notions of disembodied souls, immortal souls, and things like moral charge are secondary developments. They are personal/religious beliefs beyond the scope of this article. Our concern here is the baseline, lowest-common-denominator understanding.  These innovations in the notion of animus will be explored in future articles, as will the soul/spirit distinction (or lack thereof).

Can one thing have more than one soul?

Many cultures believe in multiple souls or the soul in numerous distinct components and the loss of one lead to illness or death. This includes the dualistic notion of souls found in the Platonic/Homeric tradition, 19th-century Spiritualist belief, and ancient Chinese thought (Hun and Po).

Other traditions had even more complex notions of the human soul, including the Norse and, most famously, the Egyptians (whose soul could have anywhere from 3-8 facets). The traditional beliefs of the Hmong of Southeast Asia hold that chronic conditions may be caused by the loss of the soul of a particular body part, which must be called back to the body.

Don’t be afraid to play with poly-animate thinking in your own storytelling!

Animata

In anthropology, animism is the belief in individualized animating forces. In the same discipline, animatism is the belief in impersonal animating forces.

Is there a cosmic force that you regard as being impersonal, which is to say, without individuality or persona? Do you view luck as a force rather than a willful actor? Then luck is an animatistic force. 

Charms like this attract luck as a force rather than signifying
devotion to a person or persona of luck.

You can readily find other animata elsewhere. Lightning is regarded as an animatistic force in many cultures, as are miasmas. Hell, you could consider the radiation coming off of uranium ore animata.

Radiation knows no reason; it cannot be negotiated with; it simply is.

An incredibly influential animatistic notion in modern fantasy fiction is mana. Mana is a supernatural concept from the cultures of Oceania and Polynesia. Mana is as definitionally diverse as the cultures that believe it. Still, the through-line is that it is a potent supernatural force that can be invested in deities, persons, places, and things. In some places, the mana held by tribal chieftains would pollute where they walked with supernatural potency, causing people to become ill if it wasn’t ritually dispersed.*

*Anecdotal: This compiler cannot find old education materials from the anthropology lectures this compiler attended more than a decade ago.

A derived form of this concept is endemic to fantasy, especially in video games, where it is a manageable resource that fuels the abilities of spellcasting player characters.

90% of our memory of Diablo II consists of staring at this thing.

Animatistic forces such as mana provide many opportunities for storytellers, not just because they serve as a convenient resource for “fueling” magical action but because of their potential side effects. Suppose magic can be engaged as an impersonal substance with predictable behaviors and lingering effects. In that case, it encourages the storyteller to consider the long-term consequences of magic that don’t stem from the retribution of an intelligent supernatural actor.

Paizo’s Golarion setting has a region known as the Mana Wastes, full of magical dead zones and pockets of unpredictable wild magic due to a conflict between two powerful magical empires in the distant past.

Masculine and Feminine

These are terms with a lot of baggage, especially in the current political climate, so we’ll cut to the chase and use the Hermetic definitions:

Masculine - That which shapes but does not generate.

Feminine - That which generates but does not shape.

Observe that the upward-oriented triangle (masculine) and the downward-oriented triangle (feminine) find union in the hexagrammatic Seal of Solomon. This will be explored further in our article on the *Pentagram*.

Masculine and feminine are the binary characteristics of universal animation, the shaping and generating principles, respectively. All observable animation shapes, generates, or demonstrates some admixture of the two. They can either be creative or destructive. The actions of the sculptor and the vandal show the opposite polarities of shaping, while the soil of the field and the rust of the plow reveal the creative/destructive dimensions of the generating principle, nurturing the plants of the field or breaking a tool down from purpose shape to constituent matter.

These ideas of masculine and feminine as principles are damn-near universal, finding clear articulation in the West in Neoplatonic/Hermetic thought and in the East in Taoism (Yin/Yang). These definitions cut through the formal magical traditions, such as alchemy and Solomonic sorcery, and are an essential feature of many conceptions of enlightenment. 

In alchemy, the state of enlightenment is communicated through the Philosopher’s Stone and its anthropomorphic icon, the Rebis. The Rebis is a bicephalic man/woman figure that expresses the hypostasis (transcendent unification) of these cosmic animating principles and, thus, a wholly liberated creative will. 

This has global parallels, as can be seen in the androgynous bissu shamans of the Bugis culture in Thailand, as well as in the Maya-region shaman priests known as mother-fathers (Quiche: s. Chuchkahaw, pl. Chuchkahawib.)

The bissu Puang Matoa Saidi.

The universality of these definitions will become more apparent throughout this archive’s development as we explore both cosmological structuring and magical practice. Additionally, we’ll review the numerous other associations wrapped up in “masculine” and “feminine” in our article on the *Tria Prima* of alchemy.

What about the sexes?

The sexes, male and female, are downstream of these animating forces. Sex is subordinate to masculine and feminine; masculine and feminine are not subordinate to sex.

Alternative Expression?

Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” This might be for personal reasons, or these words won’t play well with your target audience. Are there other framing devices available?

Yes. Many.

Let's look at just one.

Wyrd: Fire and Ice

According to Nevill Drury in The Watkins Dictionary of Magic, the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd (Norse urd) is the notion in Anglo-Saxon sorcery that the universe is a complex interplay of the conflicting forces of fire and ice.

A quick internet search shows that…this may not be the normative case, as wyrd is usually used to describe fate, and the symbol for wyrd is a web describing the interplay of forces governing destiny.

This might not represent fire and ice.

The Neopagan movement may have influenced Drury’s definition, which is not always accurate in recreating ancient beliefs.

However, the ancestral mythology of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse share Germanic origins. Norse mythology tells us that the universe was created by the violent meeting of fire and ice in the Ginnungagap (“yawning void”). 

If fire and ice are the primordial duality in Germanic folklore, that’s a perfectly acceptable framing to exploit. If all animation in the universe is a consequential result of the clash of ice and fire, thinking of wyrd in terms of the interplay of fire and ice is valid, even if that may not have been how the Anglo-Saxons would frame it.

Sidenote: If anyone is interested in correcting us, feel free to namedrop a source.

Would we substitute?

While forces like fire and ice are rich in texture, they’re limiting as both refer to tangibles and come from people living in harsh northern environments. Such a framing would be unsuitable for a story set in a world primarily influenced by Egypt or Mesoamerica, as in both regions, ice would be a sufficiently uncommon phenomenon to prevent it from being thought coequal with fire (sun, stars, volcanic activity, etc.).

One of the significant advantages of the shaping/generating dichotomy is that it’s abstract enough to avoid these sorts of hiccups. It allows enough room for characters and cultures to make their own culturally relevant (if cosmically imperfect) interpretations of forces without leading to logical inconsistencies in the underlying systems you’ve devised for your stories.

In Summary

Quintessence, or soul, is a much simpler concept than its cultural baggage might suggest. A firm grasp of the simplest, most basic definitions will serve you well as you develop into more complex, opaque subject matter.

Bibliography

-Drury, N. (2007). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic (First South Asian). Watkins Publishing. 

-Freidel, D. A., Schele, L., & Parker, J. (2001). Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. Perennial. 

-Mythology & Fiction Explained. (2017a, October 17). The creation of the Universe - Norse mythology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9h08JOcSY 

-National Geographic. (2017b, January 15). Shaman performs rite to protect a man’s soul from the underworld | national geographic. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxIXIi1kR0 

-Paizo, Inc. (n.d.). Mana Wastes. PathfinderWiki. https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Mana_Wastes

-Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, April 25). Bissu. Wikipedia. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bissu 

Edit History:

-5/15/2023: I briefly expanded the section on the multi-part human soul to provide some better starting points for research for readers. Also added some piping.

Magical Practice: What is Magic?

    There’s a significant problem in tackling this question because nearly any definition I have found in my research has mistakenly emphasized only one dimension of magic.

    Aleister Crowley, in his 1929 work Magick in Theory and Practice, presented this formulation:

“MAGICK

is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with the Will."

(Formatting preserved)

    The late Nevill Drury, who penned The Watkins Dictionary of Magic and The Watkins Dictionary of the Esoteric, gives this definition:

“Magic The overarching name given to the body of techniques and ritual practices used to harness the secret powers of nature and to influence events for one’s own purpose.”

    We could provide other examples of definitions for the word from other sources, but they’re all in the same direction: They are all concerned with magic as a craft.

The Problem with Craft

    Alright, they’re all concerned with craft. This archive is concerned primarily with assisting fantasy storytellers with understanding historical inspiration. Aren’t a lot of fantasy writers obsessed with their magic systems? How do these definitions run against that grain?

    This approach is counterproductive because magic refers to a quality and an action. The craft falls under action but fails to communicate anything about quality. 

    Let’s look at a few examples of magic as quality.

Jack and the Beanstalk

    We all know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk: boy sells his starving family’s most valuable possession, and gets magic beans instead of what he was supposed to buy. His mother furiously throws them out the window, and the following day, they’ve grown into a giant beanstalk that reaches up into the clouds, with a giant and a goose that lays golden eggs, a golden harp, or something of that nature.

Art by Walter Crane (1845-1915)

    Where, in this story, is the “Science” (knowledge) and “Art” (trade/craft/skill) of magic? Where is the “technique” or “ritual practice?” What secret powers were “harnessed?” Who “influenced events for their own purposes?”

    The story hinges on Jack’s mother not appreciating the value of the beans because she thought her son was scammed. There is no intentionality to the end of the road to the giant’s home and the golden goose. There is no craft in the story; the beans are simply magic. 

    If the growth properties of the beans qualify as magic and the narrative does not convey craft, then a craft-exclusive definition of magic is unsuitable in the generic.

Magical Magnets

    The attractive power of magnets is now well-understood by science, and proper magnets no longer fall under the domain of the mystical, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other kinds of magnets in the magical record.

    Lecouteux’s source on this appears to be Aristoteles de lapidibus. Unfortunately, we cannot verify this, as the only English work we’ve found that might go over a translation of that text looks to be behind a paywall. (We’re not paying $58.00 for access to one paper.)

    Our example from that source text is what Lecouteux calls the “magnet of fingernails.” 

    The magnet of fingernails has a few bizarre properties. First is that it’s incredibly soft, yet impervious to being scratched by iron or diamond, but will crack when in contact with blood. 

    Second, and more importantly, it will rip your fingernails off.

    Why? No clue. What we know is that it pulls nail clippings to itself like iron filings to a regular magnet, and if it gets in contact with the nails still on your fingers, they’re coming off.

Say goodbye to these!

    This does not appear to be a manufactured material, meaning that the stone's fingernail-tearing field is intrinsic and that intrinsic magical properties extend beyond the genre of fairytales.

Mount Zimurc’s Burning Stone

    According to the European legends of the great Oriental Christian patriarch-king, Prester John, the zimur stones of Mount Zimurc burn continuously, so hot that they must be picked up with iron tongs. This legend likewise tells of a freezing stone with the opposite effects. The northern threshold of Prester John’s palace is made of freezing stone, and you must bear a burning stone to survive passage through it, while the southern entrance was created with the burning zimur, and one had to carry a freezing stone to survive the intense heat.

Image taken from Maddy's blogspot, information taken from Lecouteux. Actual source unknown to this compiler.

    The same stories claim that the zimur stone could be crafted into vessels that could cook food without fire.

    One might be inclined to argue that these properties are “natural” because they are intrinsic, like the magnet of fingernails. However, we cannot back up that assessment; modern science has not observed and verified such things. They contradict scientific understanding, not just because they are most certainly not real, but because they are irrationalities that defy normal cause and effect.

    This finally brings us to our definition of magic.

What is Magic?

    For our definition to be useful, we need to be all-inclusive of everything magical while being entirely exclusive of everything else. To this end we cannot define magic as a science in the modern sense, nor would parascience be a sufficient descriptor.

    The word demands two distinct definitions:

Magic (Generic) - That which circumvents the normal rules of cause and effect by virtue of novelty.

Magic (Craft) - The art of intentionally circumventing the normal rules of cause and effect by novel means.

    These definitions include everything described under magic as a craft and all irrational, parascientific, and inexplicable supernatural phenomena.

    This excludes the body of modern science, which (relevant to this discussion) refers to implementing novel means to determine normal cause and effect, which is not magic.

    This also excludes implementing knowledge of normal cause and effect to enact change in the world to alter the outcome of events or manifest one’s will, which would qualify as engineering.

Extracting Value

    These definitions of magic are all-inclusive, leaving room for the high-minded, systematized parascientific approach observed in some practices and employed by many a fantasy author while also allowing for recognition of the unique qualities and blunders that fall outside of intentional action.

    Storytellers with this in mind can make more deliberate decisions about how they go about systematizing or deconstructing magic in their own stories.

    When we next return to this topic, we’ll go over the broad strokes of how people practice and think of magic.

Bibliography

-Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. 1929. 

-Drury, Nevill. The Watkins Dictionary of Magic. First South Asian ed., Watkins Publishing, 2007. 

-Lecouteux, Claude. A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: Their Magical and Medicinal Powers Based on the Earliest Sources. Inner Traditions, 2012. 

-Maddy. “The Legend of Prester John.” The Legend of Prester John ~, 5 Mar. 2016, https://maddy06.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-legend-of-prester-john.html.