Element

Air

Origin 360 BCE to 320 BCE

Air is one of the four classical Western elements, the element of mind, speech, and connection. Its qualities are hot and moist: warm, light, and mobile, the most sociable and diffuse of the four. In astrology it forms the air triplicity of Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, signs of intellect, relationship, and ideas, and in tarot it is the suit of Swords, the suit of thought, conflict, truth, and the power of the mind. In the doctrine of the four humors it corresponds to the sanguine temperament, ruled by blood, marked by cheerfulness, curiosity, and quick sociability. In the Golden Dawn scheme of directions it is placed in the East, the region of sunrise, and its season is spring, the season of fresh growth and rising breath. Air is thought and relationship in motion, the medium of communication that carries voices and links minds. It is the invisible connective principle among the elements.

Facts

Origins

Origin Period

360 BCE to 320 BCE 1Aristotelian physics: the four elements and the quintessence

Origin Period

500 BCE to 400 BCE 1Greek 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

Through Old French air, from Latin aer, from Greek aer, meaning air or mist. 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Hot and wet. Air stands between fire and water in the scheme; the modern reading of air as intellect and communication is not in the source. 1Aristotelian physics: the four elements and the quintessence

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Air in the Western Scheme

Air is one of the four classical elements, and in the Aristotelian scheme of qualities it is hot and wet, light and mobile, rising above earth and water toward fire. As an element it stands for the mind, thought, speech and communication, for the intangible and the moving, breath and wind, the medium of sound and of the spoken word. The tradition assigns the three air signs, Gemini, Libra and Aquarius, to it, read as intellectual, social and oriented toward ideas and relationships. In humoral medicine air corresponds to blood and the sanguine temperament, warm and moist, sociable and optimistic.

In Western ceremonial magic air is placed in the east, the quarter of the rising sun and of dawn, associated with the ritual dagger or sword and with the faculty of intellect and analysis. Its attribution to the tarot suit of Swords is part of the Golden Dawn scheme of 1888. Throughout, air carries a symbolism of intellect, communication, freedom and the swift-moving, the element least bound to place and most identified with the life of the mind.

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

Air in Western Practice

Air is the element with the least stable set of attributions in the Western working traditions, and the instability is instructive rather than accidental.

In astrology air is a triplicity: Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. That grouping is settled, it is in Ptolemy, and no school disputes it. Everything downstream of it is less settled.

In the tarot, air is conventionally the suit of Swords and fire the suit of Wands, which is the Golden Dawn assignment and the one most modern decks follow. A substantial older current reverses them, giving the sword to fire as the forged and heated thing and the wand or rod to air as the breath-driven staff, and this is not a mistake in either direction: it is two schools reading the same objects by different logics. Anyone comparing two systems of correspondence should establish which convention each is using before concluding that one of them has made an error.

In the Golden Dawn system air is placed in the east, given the dagger as its working implement and the archangel Raphael as its regent. The eastern placement is the one attribution here that reaches back further, since dawn, breath and the beginning of the day form an old cluster.

The element's stable core, across every school that disagrees about the rest, is mind, speech and relation: air is what passes between things rather than what any one thing is made of. Aristotle gives it hot and wet, the qualities of expansion and of taking the shape of what holds it.

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

Air

3 entries

Implement Of

Connections

Associated With

Asia

The air triplicity governs the northeast quarter.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Date Palm

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the date palm to Air, against the solar rulership the old herbals give it.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham

Empedocles

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

Linden

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the linden to Air.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham

Pine

Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the pine to Air, against the martial rulership the old herbals give it.

Source Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical HerbsScott Cunningham

Raphael

Sanguine

In the classical Hippocratic-Galenic scheme this temperament, its humor blood, and its qualities warm and moist are paired with the element Air.

Source Ancient MedicineVivian Nutton

Sylphs

Named as the elemental beings ruling the classical element Air in Paracelsus's Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmaeis et Salamandris et de Caeteris Spiritibus.

Source Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmaeis et Salamandris et de Caeteris SpiritibusParacelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim)

The Eighteenth Call