Earth

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 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