Damigeron's Dungeon: Clear Cosmology: The Elements

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Earth 01 - Earth as Substance
Earth 02 - Places of Earth
Earth 03 - Magic of Earth
Earth 04 - Earth Personified

Earth as Substance

Earth. Ge. Úr. Prithvi. Dirt.

Having covered the principle of animation itself, we bring our attention to the least animate of the elements. So, let us address the first question: What is Earth?

Earth, also called “soil,” is a mixture of minerals, organic matter, liquid, gases, and organisms in a matrix. It also refers to the “ground” or “dry land,” which are features of planet Earth that are not covered in water.

Oh, it’s also the name of our planet.

This stuff.

Typically, Earth is the Mother Goddess, the bride of the Sky-Father, the feminine of the two halves of material reality (with notable exceptions, such as the Egyptian Geb, the Earth-Father). She is the nurturer, providing the land’s bounty as the mother from her breast.

Sculpture of Cybele, whom the Greeks syncretized with Gaia.

Conversely, she is the devourer, consuming the dead interred within her flesh. Ashes to ashes, to Earth we must return. Her womb, the cave, her mouth, our grave.

Tlaltecuhtli, the devouring Earth-mother of Central Mexico.

She may be the great earth/mud monster from whom the world was created. We see this in the she-dragon Tiamat in the Babylonian Enûma Elish or in the ravenous Earth-mother of Aztec myth, Tlaltecuhtli, who is variably identified with the primordial caiman-beast Cipactli. As living flesh or cadavers, these monsters lend their bodies to the world as “place.” Their meat is soil, and their bone is stone.

This dual nature of the personified Earth as the giver and taker of life describes the cycle of life and death. That which gives ultimately takes in the eternal pattern of creation and dissolution.

The Egyptian god Khnum crafting humanity from clay.

While Earth often appears in one of these animate guises—mother or monster—its role shifts dramatically when viewed as raw material. Stripped of an inherent anthro- or zoomorphism it becomes the substance from which persons arise. In the form of mud, clay, and dust, the gods fashion Man!

Earth is the lowest of the Four Elements, marked by its density, darkness, opacity, and relative lack of independent animation.

In other words, Earth is heavy and unmoving, and you can’t see through it. It is the solid state of matter, and the term typically refers to inorganic mineral substances.

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Earth is generally feminine (read: passive) relative to the other three elements. Plato identified it as dry and cold.

Earth also composes half of the universe at the human scale, constituting all that is actually a place. All scenes require ground beneath the players’ feet, or at least the simulacra in the form of flooring or other orientational marker.

Earth’s stability was identified with regularity, hence why many cultures (especially China) represented it graphically as a square.

Earth fertility symbolism accounts for the use of earth (and sometimes "burials") in rites of passage.

Couplings in furrows were a popular feature of rural life at spring fertility festivities until recently.

Although associated with darkness, passivity, and the fixed principle, its symbolism as a source of life tended to separate it in ancient thought from the underworld of death. Representation of this liminal relationship is often gentle.

In contrast, when these domains are blended, the representation can be pretty violent. Cihuacoatl, the Aztec goddess of Earth and childbirth, was perceived to feed on the dead to nourish the living.

In summary, Earth is:

Heavy
Stable
Dark
Feminine
Fertility
Death

Earthquakes
Earth’s normative state is stillness, the calm unmoving, leading to its identification with stability. This likely informs the beliefs of many ancient people that earthquakes are not inherent to the Earth itself but caused by external forces. Often, these were attributed to the wrath of gods (such as Poseidon in Greece) or the movement of great beasts.

For the Maya, earthquakes were the movements of the great ogre Kabrakhan, dried out and buried alive in a cask, shifting and kicking at his ceramic prison. The Japanese attributed the shuddering of the earth to a monstrous catfish named Manazu. In South and Southeast Asia, where it was believed four great elephants held up the corners of the Earth on the back of a turtle, the violent shaking of the land was attributed to the shrugging of these elephants. In Northern Europe, it was the world-ending wolf Fenrir straining against his bonds in the underworld. In North America, it was the shifting of a great serpent.

An 1855 Edo depiction of Namazu, a common motif. Here, the women of the pleasure district attack Namazu, to his delight, threatening another earthquake. Yes, this is a sex joke.

Others provide more exotic explanations. Pliny the Elder proposed earthquakes were caused by winds violently breaking free after getting trapped underground. There is some truth to this, in that violent seismic activity can result from the buildup of volcanic gases.

Earth is the World, the stage of action for all four(five) elements, the place of happening. It stands firm beneath all mortal drama, unmoving. It is that which gives way and holds, retaining the shape imposed upon it. It is the great attractor, the down which all that goes up must return. It is the giving mother, the gestating womb, the place where paths cross, the concrete. It is salt and darkness and complication. It both manifests the divine world of the abstract but also distracts from it. It is the deception of solidity and the truth of impermanence. It is becoming. It is flesh. It is life and death.

Eliphas Levi's pentagram from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie.

There is an impulse in persons we designate here as “Elementalists” to find parallels at all levels of consideration on any subject. Some of these associations are intuitive and naturalistic, others more firmly rooted in contrivances of culture. As in anything else from classical philosophy, Earth has been subject to nearly 2,000 years of this sort, persistently shoving the square peg into the round hole until it’s mangled enough to stick in place.

One such recent group is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which neatly summarized many long-standing (if convoluted) connections:

Earth is associated with the cardinal direction of North, with the planet Saturn, and the zodiac signs of Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn. Its season is winter, its hour is midnight, and it is bound to the new moon.

The Golden Dawn held that Earth represented the duality of the barren/sterile and infinite potentiality/transformation. Old, fertile emptiness nourishes the creation of the new.

We neither affirm nor deny the claims made by this source.

Consideration of Color
Our sources have identified the colors brown and green with Earth. Still, as with any occult practice in history, such things may be subject to infinite permutation and adjustment for any reason.

While the serious exploration of Elementalist contrivance occurs later in this article series, we take time here to point out that visual storytellers should consider the color language of their work, especially concerning the elements. One look at Avatar: The Last Airbender should tell you how important this is on the face of it.

It is also worth considering that color variations exist across cultures, and those colors can be used to identify a character or group’s relationship to the element. A group that identifies Earth as green may prioritize its nourishing properties. A culture that identifies Earth with yellow may prioritize the discovery of hidden riches. Yet another that identifies Earth with black prioritizes darkness, secrecy, and heaviness. Earth-as-element is dynamic, and your characters and cultures participate in that dynamic.

Alternate Forms of Earth
Thus far, we have glossed Earth as a completely interchangeable phenomenon, dancing around its diversity of forms. Here, we examine these allotropes, their distinct properties, and their meanings. Storytellers who can navigate these peculiarities while minding their shared elemental category will be better able to develop novel characters, settings, magical practice, and integration of material considerations with their themes.

A big pile of dirt.

Soil functions as the baseline for all of the considerations of Earth previously described in this article. It is an opaque, granular mineral matrix with an admixture of water and organic matter in varying quantities. It is alive with microbial, plant, animal, and fungal life. This is Earth as generative material, the only allotrope of Earth that realizes the entire cycle of life.

Mud

Mud is the significant admixture of water and soil or water and clay. Together, the two elements form the undifferentiated, generative chaos described as the “moist Nature” in the Poemandres in the second book of the Corpus Hermeticum, Poemander, verses 6-7:

6. Then from that Light, a certain Holy Word joined itself unto
Nature, and out flew the pure and unmixed Fire from the moist
Nature upward on high; it is exceeding Light, and Sharp, and
Operative withal. And the Air which was also light, followed the Spirit
and mounted up to Fire (from the Earth and the Water) insomuch
that it seemed to hang and depend upon it.

7. And the Earth and the Water stayed by themselves so mingled
together, that the Earth could not be seen for the Water, but they
were moved, because of the Spiritual Word that was carried upon

Clay

Filling a role between soil and stone, clay is a fine-grained matrix that, by the addition of water, is transformed into an ordered mud. Contrary to the undifferentiated chaos of mud, the flat grains of clay compact into something workable by the hand into useful forms and, when fired, retain such a shape with the rigidity of stone. This is the basis of the entire ceramics industry. In ancient conception, a material of such recognized utility exists for the sake of that utility, making it cosmically ordered. For this reason, in many mythologies, humanity is crafted from clay by the gods: humans exist to be of use to the gods as clay exists to be of use to humans.

Further, Clay has served as the support material for the first written records in human history, making it a material synonymous with the development of civilization.

Stone

Unlike the granular matrix of soil, which yields to the shaping force with a softer touch, stone forms a more or less rigid mass that must be worked by grinding or violent blows. More reliable than soil, sand, or clay, stone forms the foundations of houses and temples just as it forms the foundation of the bones of the world itself. Older than the trees, the stone is permanent and strong, emblematic of longevity and immortality in many cultures.

In the feminine, stone may not yield life as the soil does, but it can yield water. From caves and springs, water gushes forth, a feature that is identified as a manifestation of the divine. Absent an obvious connection to groundwater, Moses struck his rod into a stone, and water flowed from the spot, as a revelation of the God of Abraham as the source of Life. Christians believe this is repeated in the man of Jesus of Nazareth as a revelation of Christ, the “Rock of Ages.”

Perhaps more dramatically, stone as eternal Earth has served as the womb of gods, most notably Mithras.

Mithras emerging from stone in the Baths of Diocletian, Rome.

The rigidity of stone is also identified with the masculine. As a Chinese painting convention, the stone indicates the active masculine yang. This does follow, as though stone accepts shaping (feminine) from a masculine Will, stone does not generate, and its rigidity allows it to manifest the shaping principle. Stone does this in the active as a tool (the knife, the axe, the chisel) or in the passive as a building material by shaping space—more on this in the section on Megaliths.

Stone is not only the foundation of buildings but also of writing in the form of carved tablets, which are more resilient than works of clay. When worn, stones form the foundation of amulets. This may be related to stone’s property as a retainer of animating forces in the form of heat, given that stone retains heat or cold for long periods, without becoming animate itself.

In the abstract, the stone’s role as the foundation is of great cultural significance. Christ told Simon, “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matthew 16:18, NIV) The Philosopher’s Stone is regarded as the foundation of wisdom. One can find stability and strength in ideas or persons, which are analogous to the resilience and reliability of stone.

In cultures that have moved on from an animistic outlook, stones are interpreted as lifeless, and identification of one with stone evokes the idea that one is cold, unfeeling, and heartless.

And finally, a thrown stone indicates harm, ill intent, and death.

Sand

An emblem of multiplicity due to its countless grains, sand is an allotrope of Earth that significantly overlaps with, counter-intuitively, water. In many desert cultures in North Africa and the Middle East, it substitutes water for ritual purification, forming dry seas on land (see our Desert entry in [Earth 02]).

Like the water it parallels, sand is unstable and unsuitable for building on. It is fundamentally unstable. Only a fool builds on sand. However, it can be combined with gravel, lime, and water to produce artificial stone, such as concrete.

The granular quality of sand and its limited ability to flow made it useful in the past for telling time, and it was used in sand clocks and the more refined hourglass. This relationship to time and sand’s apparent sterility made it emblematic of death. When observed to slip through the fingers when handled, sand is identified with our ever-limited time on this Earth, each day, month, and year, slipping through our fingers.

Hourglass, German, first quarter of the 16th century.

The above is compounded by marriage of sand and air, as sandstorms whip the hard grains about with great force, scouring away at stone. Sand degrades even the greatest works of men in stone and metal, reminding us that not even stone is truly immortal. Sand, then, is obliteration.

However, this scouring quality has proven quite useful to us. Sanding was employed well into prehistory, scraping away the undesirable and leaving only refined material. This is likely the basis of sand’s use in ritual purification described earlier.

Finally, sterile sand is more possessed of animation than stone. While sand is typically vitalized externally by the wind, it occasionally possesses its own wind, producing singing sand.

Domestic dust

There is a subset of sand called “dust.” Dust is any granular material that cannot be put to use. Too fine to be used in concrete, too small and soft to be put to use in sanding, and worthless as an additive to clay for ceramics, dust is defined as good-for-nothing. Dust is an inert, non-generative chaos, a hindrance only.

The God of Abraham made Man from dust (aphar) per Genesis 2:7 as a manifestation of the divine Will: transforming that which is definitionally worthless into His Image (that which manifests the Will of deity). The uselessness of dust is vital to understanding this act of Creation as revelatory hypostasis: Man as worthlessness tasked with supreme purpose.

Salt mounds in Bolivia.

We have already gone over salt as one of the Tria Prima of alchemy, but it’s worth reiterating before delving into the other dimensions of salt as Earth.

Salt is a distilled, concrete substance absent animation. It is the material of matter. It is the contractive force, pulling in the animating forces and dissolving into new forms as it gives the animate body. Similarly, it crystallizes the abstract into the world of the concrete.

Because salt must be processed and refined, it is an emblem of the process of purification as well as purity as such. It is self-knowledge, scrutiny, and enlightenment. It preserves food, staving off the corruption of putrefaction, literally and figuratively. Salt is not just pure; it is incorruptible.

It is a key emblem of hospitality worldwide, especially in the Middle East, where it is an essential commodity. Refined salt not only adds flavor to food but also brings out the flavor of other ingredients, elevating a dish to something greater than the sum of its parts. For this reason, the Christian elect were the “salt of the Earth” by their own purity, bringing out the best in other people. This transcendent quality ties it to wisdom (as previously discussed) but more vulgarly to the bite of sharp wit.

The combination of substance and purity lends salt a protective quality in magic. Superstitions regarding throwing salt over the left (sinister) side of the body trace back to the Greeks and Romans, who regarded spilled salt as an ill omen. This belief has persisted and is found in great works of art. This includes da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495), where Judas Iscariot is depicted as having knocked over the salt.

Judas, holding the bag of silver and knocking over the salt.

The Namibia Meteorite, the largest intact meteorite currently known.

Meteors are stones from heaven. They gave the ancients confirmation of their perception that the sky was a great vault and that even the stars were fixed in stone. This lends meteors and their derived sky metal the touch of the divine, being a cast-off or loose stone from the foundation of Heaven. Such stones bring significant inversion, with tools and objets d’art crafted from meteors being literal heavenly objects rather than the crude simulacra carved from lowlier forms of Earth.

Meteors are regarded as divine sparks or seeds, as their habit of burning through the atmosphere and explosively striking the Earth are masculine phenomena. Like lightning, this imparts meteors with a phallic/seminal quality, a shaping force sent down from the heavens.

Meteors are believed to be the source of a number of cultic objects, such as the Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca or the stone placed in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

This dagger, found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, is forged from meteoric iron.

Quartz

Crystals and their worked form, jewels, are another transcendent allotrope of Earth. Rather than cover them here, we will cover them at length in their own [article].

* * * * * * *

An Introduction to the Four Elements

Quintessence
Water [PENDING]
Air [PENDING]
Fire [PENDING]

Chaos and Order

Prima Materia - Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur (and Chaos)

Salt
Mercury
Sulfur

Gods and Principles [PENDING]

Sprites and Spirits [PENDING]

The Planets [PENDING]

Macrocosm, Astrology, and the Zodiac [PENDING]

The Structure of the Soul [PENDING]

* * * * * * *

-Drury, N. (2004). The Dictionary of the Esoteric: 3000 entries on the mystical and occult traditions. Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

-Drury, N. (2005). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic: 3000 entries on the magical traditions. Watkins.

-Tresidder, J. (2008). The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols. Watkins.

-Trismegistus, H. (1999). Corpus Hermeticum (J. Everard, Trans.; Vol. 2). levity.com(Defunct).
The original upload source for this work is defunct. The text can be found here ( https://darkbooks.org/pp.php?v=1626680463 )

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoric_iron ]
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite ]
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namazu ]

[Img 01 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stagnogley.JPG ]

[Img 02 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unknown_-_Statue_of_a_Seated_Cybele_with_the_Portrait_Head_of_her_Priestess_-_57.AA.19.jpg ]

[Img 03 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tlaltecuhtli_monolith.jpg ]

[Img 04 - https://www.pinterest.com/pin/547468898431050613/ ]

[Img 05 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Namazu-e.jpg ]

[Img 06 - https://www.britannica.com/topic/pentagram ]

[Img 07 - https://forum-dev.ntc.dsausa.org/features52/zodiac-earth-signs.html ]

[Img 08 - https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photo-pile-soil-piles-building-site-image39338275 ]

[Img 09 - https://crown-machinery.com/project/infrastructure-mud/ ]

[Img 10 - https://medium.com/@ioannis.tsiokos/modeling-clay-990913aefb82 ]

[Img 11 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DirkvdM_rocks.jpg ]