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origins
It is my impression that a notion of first three “elements”
and later ‘1+3’, as opposed to four equitable elements plus
a fifth element, ‘4+1’, as defined by Aristotle, may have
been subliminally prominent throughout the ages long
before recorded history and Greek philosophers.
In a nutshell, ‘1’ would have become what makes things
move, energy, fire, and ‘3’ would have evolved to air-water-earth,
the states of matter gas-liquid-solid. Colors would
have been implicitly the light green of catkins and explicitly
white–red–black
in the order of a ripening mulberry, with
roots in prehistoric cults around fire, and likely the moon,
both as single creatress and in triplicity, world-wide.
[image]
First named colors in virtually all languages were white-red-black
as the colors of fire (light): black as dark, white as
bright, and red as the colors of fire from flame to embers,
yellow to red. Fire, humanity’s first major discovery, would
have initially been preserved in a raised mound of ashes
(white) around a core of glowing coal (red around black).
There would also have been cults around this, most likely
a universal “white” moon/fire creatress/goddess. In ancient
Greece sacrifices were given into fire and the first sacrifice
always given to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.
[image]
One of the earliest Indian Upanishads, the Chandogya
Upanishad, which dates back to at least around 700 BCE,
relates these three colors to “elements”: red-fire, white-water
and black-earth, probably also since water is more
transparent (and hence “brighter”) and ashes more “fluid”
than earth resp. coal. It appears that at some point red
became associated with air instead and the goddess came
to represent fire and moon as the ruler of a triplicity of
air-water-earth or sky, sea and underworld. Colors assigned to
elements by Antiochus of Athens around the second century
CE were accordingly yellow-fire, white-water, red-air and
black-earth, and at least today’s symbols are triangles.
[image]
Contrary to Aristotle’s model, which is a priori based on
touchable properties in the outer world, the present model
involves also things inside the mind. In the outer world, emo
and ero could be mapped via fire/earth to “energy/matter”
with matter split up into its 3 main states solid-liquid-gas.
Maybe inside, since ‘states’ suggests resting, emi could
be ‘1’ and eri could be split into 3 ‘states of mind’: memory
(‘earth’), logical constructs including language (‘air’) and
free imagination (‘fire’), with increasing degrees of freedom
similar to solid-liquid-gas (‘earth-water-air’) outside, yielding
8 ‘elements’, similar to the trigrams of the I Ching ?
See the section psyche for a tentative explanation of
why in culture first just three “proto-elements”, black earth
(ero), white water (emi) and red fire (eri+emo).
leads
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Could three main states of matter outside be derived from
the model or would that have to be added via experimental
facts, like the observation that freedom inside seems larger
than outside, which lead to passive/active, soft/hard, etc. ?
And similarly for three states of mind inside ?
Maybe mirror elements in↔out, plus somehow naturally group
what has been mirrored to ‘states’ with ero/eri ?
Outside fire practically never rests, like emo, but air and water
can, plus remind of inner softness; inside feelings practically
always flow, like emi, but memories and ideals (ideas, dreams,
wishes) can persist, plus remind of outer hardness.
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In the I Ching, poles of ‘1+3’ are father-mother resp. heaven-earth
plus their 3 daughters and 3 sons. Similarly, Cronos and
Rhea had 3 daughters and 3 sons, and their parents Ouranos
and Gaia were also heaven (or mountain) and earth.
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Mother Mary could be seen as water, plus a male trinity of air
(father-fire, son-earth, spirit-air ?). And any cultural creation
thus maybe as trifold air inspired by a water muse, like in the
Odyssey, in essence the (male) “human condition” ?
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If you toss four coins, there is a 50% chance to get ‘3+1’,
a 37.5% chance to get ‘2+2’ and only 12.5% to get ‘4+0’.
Even if coins are skew, ‘3+1’ is always more probable than
‘2+2’, and ‘4+0’ only becomes the most probable result once
they are about 1:4 skew. Thus, whenever there are 4 things
in nature, chances are a priori high that they come as ‘3+1’.
[image]
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Time and space come as ‘1+3’. Their homogeneity implies
preservation of energy and momentum. The isotropy of space
implies preservation of angular momentum, while time is not
invariant to reversal, as entropy never decreases.
The 4 forces of nature known to date (at everyday energies),
electromagnetic, strong, weak and gravitational forces, come
as ‘3+1’, since gravitation is the only one closely intertwined
with spacetime and without quantum theory.
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Does space rest as it ‘is there’ and time move as it ‘flows’ ?
Might 3 main states of matter outside (ero) and 3 dimensions
of space (rest outside, ero) thus both be fundamentally tied
to the experience of conscious life ? And similarly inside ?
Definitely surreal, maybe even going in circles, and yet …
I had this idea 12 July 2023 around 09:10 in Wollishofen while
driving to work in the morning, coming from Leimbach and
turning left into the main street with the tramline.
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In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), William James
Sidis observes that inanimate processes can appear alive if
time is reversed, using the example of drops of mercury that
flow together on a metal surface and then amalgamate with
the surface. Reversed in time, drops of mercury would appear
to grow out of the metal surface and divide like living cells.
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A trinity is both 3 parts and 1 unit, so 3 turns almost
automatically to 3+1, and 4 to 4+1, or a couple+baby, 2+1.
See also the pythagorean tetractys further below. The image
for the universe may have developed from a hill via
tetrahedron/pyramid to the dodecahedron in Plato’s Timaeus, with
increasing focus on the number 5 related to Venus, due to
the 5 stations of Venus on a 5-pointed star, which is again
related to the golden ratio, to harmony, beauty, roundness.
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Before writing, myths were only preserved if people kept
remembering and retelling them to younger generations. Thus
only stories people really cared about survived. This does,
however, not imply that they necessarily consciously understood
myths analytically. In a way, myths are sort of informal
laws of nature, condense all kinds of experiences into a story.
Exploring such unconscious or even intentionally veiled legacy
spans ages, is still unfolding, even after Freud and Jung.
People living in ancient cultures were not wise just from that
connotation of ‘old’; they were rather young and fresh
compared to us who can look back so far into history. But they
were also still closer to the ‘source’ and knew things that
got lost or were maybe never explicitly written down. Some
things were also truly archaic then, simpler and more brutal;
see Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example.
In life, situations shortly after birth and close to death are
often similar, so early answers might be closer to late ones than
expected, even without cyclic ‘rebirth’ or ‘immortal souls’.
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The complex of ‘1+3’ and basic colors is very rich and beautiful,
but also a ‘can of worms’ and only partially fits here, so
just some gist below, and see my article “White-red-black
and the “green” goddess” under artemis for more.
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One of the oldest ancient Indian Upanishads, the Chandogya
Upanishad (around 700 BCE), speaks of three colors of fire:
fire-red, water-white and earth-black.
“The red colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the original]
fire; the white colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the original]
water; the black colour of [gross] fire is the colour of [the
original] earth. Thus vanishes from fire what is commonly
called fire, the modification being only a name, arising from
speech, while the three colours (forms) alone are true.”
(6.4.1, translated by Swami Nikhilananda)
These three colors, which appear as first colors in apparently
all earliest cultures able to write them down, represent most
likely a more archaic concept of color as light/fire, as follows.
Without light no colors; fire produces light; so color would be
heavily related to light; thus the basic opposites white (bright)
and black (dark), plus the color(s) of fire, red-orange-yellow.
Water is transparent, earth is often intransparent, ashes are
more “fluid” than coal, hence water-white and earth-black.
In ancient Greek, the words for black/white, mélas/leukós,
still had, maybe even primarily, the connotation of dark/bright;
the word for red, pyrrós, literally says color of fire.
In other words, no fire would have been black, lighting it red,
and fire/light would have saturated at white.
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The first 3 of the 4 riders of the apocalypse have the colors
white-red-black. The color of the fourth is chlōrós in ancient
Greek, thus related to chlorophyll, the substance that makes
leaves green. Colorwise, it was most likely a pale green/yellow
color, like new shoots of plants or also the color of a corpse.
In the fairy tale around Baba Yaga, three riders appear, white-day
at dawn, red-sun when the sun rises, black-night when it
gets dark. They are all explicitly servants of Baba Yaga, who
also has three pairs of helping hands, which identify her as the
triple moon goddess Hecate-Artemis, who is both a goddess
of death and of birth, acting also as midwife in mythology.
The idea behind this would be that the moon would be the
ruling light in the sky because it alone can appear both at
day and night, and can even shadow the sun during a total
solar eclipse. In folklore, Baba Yaga’s house is mobile, stands
on chicken legs, the rooster being again a symbol of fire.
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The Red Sparrow in Bukowski’s Pulp reminds of that, of fire
in the outside world that would be the spark of life and the
physical end of it, in its three states of matter (versus inside
as already suggested a triune airy poet plus water muse) ?
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Near the end of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (around 150 CE),
Apuleius encounters the goddess Isis at full moon at the sea
shortly after moonrise:
“Her many-coloured robe was of finest linen; part was glistening
white, part crocus-yellow, part glowing red and along the
entire hem a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying
in the breeze. But what caught and held my eye more
than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle.
[…] It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hem
and everywhere else, and in the middle beamed a full and fiery
moon.” (Chapter 17, translated by Robert Graves)
Shortly afterwards she describes herself:
“[…] mother of nature, encompassing mistress of elements,
first progeny of times, highest power/deity/queen, queen of
the dead, first/best (sky) deity, uniform face of gods and
goddesses, whose heavenly shining summits, salty sea breezes
[and] the dead down below in earth, silently weeped, are still
ruled by me. A single/unique goddess in multiple guises, with
changing rites, many names, worshipped all over the world.”
(translated by me)
Note that she may be saying that she rules over heaven, sea
and earth, as in Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, hence a trinity of
air-water-earth, which would make her potentially fire.
Astrologer Antiochus of Athens and physician Galenus of
Pergamon attributed colors resp. body fluids (humors) to
elements around the time Apuleius lived, based on older roots
going back at least partially to Hippocrates: white to water
(phlegm, phlegmatic), black to earth (black bile, melancholic),
yellow to fire (yellow bile, choleric) and red to air
(blood, sanguine), the colors of Isis’ dress above, plus stars
and moon for the round fifth element in the sky.
This suggests overall that maybe at some point in time air
took the place of fire in the fire trinity as in the Chandogya
Upanishad, maybe via breath as a mixture of air and fire, as
in pneuma, or maybe Indian Aum (Om), plus maybe water.
| “green” |
moon |
(rules) |
| white |
day |
water |
| red |
sun |
fire |
| black |
night |
earth |
| “energy” |
fire |
yellow |
| liquid |
water |
white |
| gas |
air |
red |
| solid |
earth |
black |
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In alchemy, also since about at least the time Apuleius lived,
the transition of materials toward the philosopher’s stone was
believed to be black-white-yellow-red, i.e. earth-water-fire-air,
which is roughly in order of lightness of the elements and
their relatively layered appearance on earth. It is apparently
also the order of elements in the four tasks that Venus gives
Psyche in The Golden Ass. All of this has ancient Egyptian
roots, with Osiris, Isis, Horus, Seth, Nephthys, etc., as well as
with ancient crafts of creating fake noble metals and gems.
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Fire must have made a great impression on humanity, as it
allowed to keep warm and have light at night, to grill, cook
and bake food, eventually to bake pottery and to forge metals.
It has even been speculated that easier to digest grilled meat
allowed humans to grow larger brains. At first presumably
people did not know how to make fire themselves, so trees
that were known or believed to attract lightning might have
been sacred. As lightning comes from the sky, the “fires” in
the sky, i.e. sun, moon, planets and stars, would have been
identified with deities in the sky that give fire. Hence the
main deity would have been in the sky, most likely the moon.
The moon can be round like fruits and berries, but also slim
and pointy like leaves, and it can grow from the shape of a
“catkin” to the round one of a ripe fruit. Attributes of such
a deity may thus have been the fruits ripening on such sacred
trees in the colors of fire, like mulberries, or similar.
Anything in nature that was not white-red-black would have
been unnamed first: green, blue, brown, pale colors like the
moon, gleaming colors; often colors that signal something
that is not crucial for survival, neither food nor danger. This
could explain why green only entered languages late, despite
being so predominant in nature. Shapes and colors of fruits
may have adapted to preferences of its consumers and they,
in turn, their sexually attractive body parts to fruits.
I imagine a child in prehistory in the arms of its mother on a
tree at night, trying to “pluck” the moon in the sky, just as it
used to pluck fruit and already earlier used to get food from
the similarly round breasts of its mother, signaled also by her
“red” nipples; thus the gentle, soft roundness of the mother
so intimately linked to the moon and the colors of life/fire.
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Robert Graves in the introduction of The Greek Myths:
“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was
regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the
concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious
thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide
her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed
the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut
being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime
mystery. Thus the first victim of a Greek public sacrifice
was always offered to Hestia of the Hearth. The goddess’s
white aniconic image, perhaps her most widespread emblem,
which appears at Delphi as the omphalos, or navel-boss, may
originally have represented the raised white mound of tightly-packed
ash, enclosing live charcoal, which is the easiest means
of preserving fire without smoke.”
Again a sequence white-red-black, ash-glow-coal, with almost
certainly roots far back into prehistory. The triangle as the
mountain on which deities lived, where lightning was more
likely to strike, not to speak of volcanoes, or as a pyramid or
the symbols for the elements, and so much more.
See also 20.2 and 90.3 in The Greek Myths about omphalos,
tripods, white-red-black, Crete, the moon-cow Io, and more.
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The fifth element is round like the moon and cyclic motion in
the sky; if the first element is fire, then so is the fifth in a circle
of elements, thus the moon goddess also a “higher octave”
of fire. Of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite,
Paris hands the apple to Aphrodite (Venus) because if you
cut an apple in half, you get a five-pointed star, like the five
stations of Venus over 8 years, where also sun and moon
return quite closely to the same positions.
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In the article “Red, White, and Black in Symbolic Thought:
The Tricolour Folk Motif, Colour Naming, and Trichromatic
Vision” (Folklore, 123:3, 310-329, 2012), Jessica Hemming
mentions that red was typically a color that is darker than
fresh blood, more towards brown. Now, Menstrual blood can
often be darker (already oxidized) than blood from a fresh
wound, which would again link to the moon.
See also her article “Pale horses and green dawns. Elusive
colour terms in early Welsh heroic poetry” (North American
journal of Celtic studies, Vol 1, No. 2, 189-223, 2017).
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Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948):
“I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her
principal colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-
trinity, but when Suidas the Byzantine [ca. 10th century CE]
records that Io was a cow that changed her colour from white
to rose and then to black he means that the New Moon is
the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red
goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess
of death and divination. Suidas’s myth is supported by
Hyginus’s fable [ca. 0 CE] of a heifer-calf born to Minos and
Pasiphae which changed its colours thrice daily in the same
way. In response to a challenge from an oracle one Polyidus
son of Coeranus correctly compared it to a mulberry—a fruit
sacred to the Triple Goddess.” (Chapter 4)
To me, the colors of the goddess would not directly reflect the
change of visible colors of the moon during its phases, as one
might think at first, but rather represent the hidden powers
that make it change, which would confirm Graves above:
The white goddess would be the power that makes the new
moon brighter (more “white”) again, towards full moon, from
little baby girl to maiden, growth. The red goddess would be
the fertile adult woman, who menstruates (red blood); she
would make the moon pregnant, the round “belly” of the
full moon. The black goddess would make the moon darker
(more “black”) again, towards new moon, withering towards
crone. The “red phase” would be somewhat abstract as the
blood would only come to light at menstruation if the bearer
did not get pregnant. I guess the idea would have been that
the child’s blood and body would have grown from that.
So the seed for a new child would be expected to grow each
month from sometime after new moon until ovulation around
full moon and, if the bearer did not get pregnant, would result
in menstrual bleeding around new moon. Note, however, that
most contemporary women do not have their individual cycles
correlated with moon phases. The average cycle is 28 days
(but varies quite a bit individually), which is closer to the
time it takes the moon to return to the same spot relative to
the fixed stars (27.3 days) than to new moon (29.5 days).
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Note that white is the principal color of the goddess simply
because it is the principal color of the moon in the sky.
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First Greek philosophers lived in Ionia (↔Io), on the western
coast of Asia Minor, and the ones who first brought philosophy
to other parts of Greece were also from there.
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Minoan-style golden seal ring found in mainland Greece at
the Acropolis in Mycenae (ca. 1450 BCE). Seems to show a
mulberry tree, sun, moon and milky way, three women with
labrys and flowers, and more. Might the two smaller women
with bulged, striped skirts maybe even symbolize bees ?
[image]
Minoan seals do not generally mirror the supposed goddess
galore so precisely and completely, some feature, for example,
two or four women, but maybe this one is more canonical ?
The labrys, so prominently at the center of the seal, seems to
have been only used for religious purposes in Minoan culture,
besides maybe just for decoration, but not as a weapon or a
tool; the material was too weak and no traces of usage.
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Empedocles would have been the first to speak of four elements,
according to Aristotle in Metaphysics (Book I 3) and
in On Generation and Corruption (Book I 1).
Since at least then, Empedocles is usually credited for having
first mentioned the four elements, in the following fragment
(DK31B6) of a poem usually called On Nature:
[image]
It speaks of “fourtold roots” at the origin of all, and then
lists four deities with some attributes, in this order: Zeus
(flashing/shining), Hera (live-giving/-bearing), Aidoneus (no
attributes), Nestis (moisture, tears/dew).
Interpreting the deities as roots of the elements, Zeus with his
thunderbolt would be fire, pregnant Hera earth, Hades, who’s
name means “unseen”, air, and Nestis obviously water.
The quote is from a work by Aetius (1st or 2nd century CE),
which has only indirectly survived in several later works
attributed to different authors. Mostly elements are attributed
the same way as me above, else earth and air are flipped.
It is obviously tempting to interpret Zeus as white, pregnant
Hera as red and Hades as black, in the ancient order of a
ripening mulberry, plus Nestis as great goddess, especially
since Nestis might be the the same goddess as the Egyptian
Nephthys, who Robert Graves calls “the Egyptian Hecate” in
The White Goddess (in the chapter Gwion’s Heresy).
Or, since Nepthys was at the spinning house in Sais, maybe in
essence basically the ancient creator goddess Neith of Sais in
the Nile Delta, with the Nile for water (as later Isis), the delta
for the female sex and a trinity, sort of reversely spinning the
Nile from the strands in the delta, hence also a creatrix ?
(The ancient Greeks identified Neith with Athena, which may
also explain some influences in Plato’s works, for example.)
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In ancient Egypt, Osiris stood for black, the fertile earth of
the Nile valley; his brother Seth for red, the desert East and
West of the valley. The mythological killing and dismembering
of Osiris by Seth presumably reflects that in ancient
times sometime after the annual flood the soil would dry up
and become fractured into a mosaic of slabs, or even into
sand and dust. Fortunately, every year the Nile, white Isis
(also like milk), would restore Osiris to life with water and
the fresh fertile black sediments carried along.
This is certainly an oversimplification of Egyptian mythologies
that evolved over millennia, but likely still captures a core.
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See this absolutely stunning article by the Ethiopian “Shakespeare”,
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin:
The Origin of the Trinity in Art & Religion: Ethiopian Roots in the Egypto-Greek & Hebrew,
on page 99-120 of African Origins of the Major World Religions,
ed. Amon Saba Saakana, Karnak House, 1988.
KaBaRa to Kabbalah and Kaaba, Egypt as Kamit (black
land), sacred tree, Osiris to Moses and others, and so much
more. I guess Fela’s song Shakara might fit in, too.
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First Corinthians 13:13: “And now these three remain: faith,
hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” The Greek
words are pístis, elpís and agápē, which are also goddesses,
and they occur prominently in Plato’s philosophy.
Faith could be interpreted as sun, bright/white, Hera; hope as
moon, dark/black, Athena; love as Venus, fire/red, Aphrodite,
the one that got the apple from Paris. These planets are also
the order of dresses in the 19th century fairy tale Three nuts
for Cinderella by Božena Němcová: sun, moon, stars, which
reminds also of Isis’ dress. Actually, these three occur already
in Mesopotamia in the 12th century BCE on a stele: Venus
for Ishtar, moon and sun for the gods Sin and Shamash.
[image]
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A closer look at the passage from the Chandogya Upanishad
mentioned further above shows that the word used for red,
rohitam, is also the word for a female red deer, as well as as
Rohini the name of the red star Aldebaran, one of the eyes of
the bull in the constellation Taurus. In ancient Greece deer
were sacred to the moon goddess Artemis, originally probably
because antlers resemble a fire. In ancient Egypt in the first
dynasties the Pharaoh used to run with the white-red-black
Apis bull at the beginning of spring when the constellation
of Taurus was rising. The moon goddess resides at birth and
death, as both midwife and goddess of death, when the new
or old moon look like a flame or a shoot, or later in history a
bow or a sickle, hence she is also celebrated at the beginning
of spring when nature starts to sprout again.
The first version of The White Goddess, which Robert Graves
wrote after new moon in the third degree of Taurus in spring
1944, was titled The Roebuck in the Thicket. Isis as the only
woman in Isis-Seth-Osiris would be white, hence The White Goddess
a fitting settled title ? Hail Artemis !
Note that in astrology the moon is exalted (a good guest) in
the 3rd degree of Taurus, or maybe around 3° (see Vettius
Valens, Anthology, book 3, chapter 4, 2nd century CE).
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Note that way more could be said around these themes; for
example, water-white is also closely related to milk and the
“mound” it comes from, or cows and the milky way and Isis as
the Nile; the three Graeae (grey women) and their single eye,
the three Fates and their fabric; purple Io like mulberry juice
and the famous die, as well as drinking wine from amethyst
goblets in Greek antiquity; the three Indian gunas (strands,
chords) in the colors white, red and black, as well as the four
varnas (colors) of social classes, with additionally yellow, all
maybe related to ancient Egyptian Ma’at; Ra as a yellow cat
with donkey ears defeating the white-red-black Apophis snake
wrapped around a green tree with red fruits in a painting in
Theban Tomb 359 of the 20th dynasty (12th century BCE);
as just a few of millions of examples…
[image]
Note that it were possibly similar depictions of Ra that led to
medieval depictions of “killer rabbits” after the crusades.
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A link from elements to fire is immediately easier to trace than
one to the moon, which may be because this would have been
a secret, the unspeakable real name of the goddess ?
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Plato talks about colors in the Timaeus, Aristotle in
On Sense and the Sensible. Both start with black and white
as basic colors, which is scientifically correct in the sense that by
selectively taking frequencies out of the full spectrum of white,
you get all colors, including black and white.
Democritus, one of the first atomists, explains colors from
microscopic structure, e.g. white as smooth, using primary
colors white-black-red-green (leukós-mélas-pyrrós-chlōrós), in
that order, of which all other colors would be composed—at
least as handed down by Priscian of Lydia in the 6th
century CE about how Theophrastus, a pupil and successor of
Aristotle, would have described it in On Sense Perception.
There are three kinds of color sensors in the human eye, for
red, green and blue, sorted from low to high frequency. None
triggered (no light) is black, plus red gives red, plus also green
gives yellow, plus also blue gives white, hence a sequence
black-red-yellow-white or earth-air-fire-water.
In Plato’s Critias the stones of Atlantis’ architecture are won
locally and have the colors white, black and red.
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Is attribution of colors and animals to points of the compass
in the Lakota “Medicine Wheel” relatively new, dating to
some time after the arrival of Europeans in America, or did
it maybe already come to America with immigrants walking
across the Bering Sea maybe over 10’000 years ago ?
The four points of the compass, plus a center, would be one
reason for 4+1 elements.
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The Yangshao culture “Xishuipo M45 Tomb” in China, which
dates back to the 4th millennium BCE, features the mosaic
of a tiger opposite the mosaic of a dragon, as constellations
in the sky, exactly the animals that are traditionally
assigned to West and East in China. Ra’s nightly fight with
the Apep/Apophis snake reminds of the phoenix and snake
(plus turtle) standing for South and North in China.
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In Egypt, the four sons of Horus stood also for the four points
of the compass, guarding specific organs as canopic jars:
liver/man/south, stomach/jackal/east, lungs/baboon/north
and intestines/falcon/west. Might they have been direct
predecessors of the ancient Greek elements, also via medicine ?
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Aristotle considers four “causes” in Physics and Metaphysics,
which remind of the four elements. Matter reminds of earth,
form of air, primary source of fire and final goal of water.
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Some fragments of Heraclitus might suggest the same circle
as Aristotle. DK22B76 seems to mention all four elements
in the same circle, earth-fire-air-water-earth, but the original
text cannot be restored for sure, according to Diels/Kranz
(DK) in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. See also fragments
B31 and B36; and B90 might suggest that Heraclitus would
have considered fire the primary substance.
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See the pythagorean tetractys and oath. Pythagoras lived
in the 6th century BCE, before Empedocles and Hippocrates.
The tetractys is a triangle with four dots on each side:
| 1 |
point |
monad (unity) |
| 2 |
line |
dyad (power) |
| 3 |
triangle/plane |
triad (harmony) |
| 4 |
tetrahedron/space |
tetrad (cosmos) |
It relates also to music via the ratios between each line, octave
(2:1), perfect fifth (3:2) and perfect fourth (4:3).
The list reminds of fire-air-water-earth (light to heavy).
But the above is apparently even more than usually for early
Greek philosophers based on speculation, since Pythagoras
reportedly never wrote anything down himself, so that there
are even less credible sources about his views in his time,
often surrounded by legends bordering on religion/sect.
DK note that practically the same word that Empedocles used
for “roots” in DK31B6 also appears in the pythagorean oath
in DK58B15, with both fragments dating back to Aetius in
early CE, so once more circular paths.
-
To ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians were apparently sort
of like the ancient Greeks in modern perception, an admired
ancient culture. It appears that the ancient Egyptians might
have kept things more secret than the Greeks in their time,
maybe only passing it on from master to pupil ?
-
As a playful teaser, note that the pyramids have five corners,
an earthly base of four, plus one on top…
[image]
With maybe even opposites attached as below (or maybe with
dry/hot and wet/cold flipped, or attached to faces instead),
reflecting the heating and drying effect of the sun during the
course of a day, similarly to the original image for yin-yang in
China as the shady and sunny sides of a hill ?
[image]
But how pyramids evolved from single “floor” mastabas via
step pyramids to their final form seems to be well researched.
Especially how Sneferu had the first three pyramids without
steps built and the first two attempts failed, does not suggest
that all that much elemental symbolism would have been in
the conscious minds of ancient Egyptians at that time.
-
Antiochus of Athens attributed elements to seasons the same
way I did with faces of the pyramids, if winter is north, etc.:
spring-air, summer-fire, autumn-earth and winter-water. The
symbols for the four elements are triangles, reminding of the
four faces of a pyramid, so whoever created those symbols
might maybe have related elements to pyramids.
The symbols also stand for female and male sexes, overlaid
to a hexagram “as above so below” for intercourse between
Gaia (earth) and Ouranos (sky). 🜂 🜁 🜄 🜃 → ✡
-
In the Timaeus Plato does not stop at the platonic solids for
the elements, but explicitly constructs all of them except the
dodecahedron (‘fifth element’) from right-angled triangles, actually
even as ‘1+3’ with ‘1’ being the cube (earth).
-
Zeus, Poseidon and Hades ruled in heaven (air), sea (water)
and underworld (earth). Life can exist in all three of these
elements, but not in fire, except in legend fire salamanders.
-
In “A few new discoveries in physics” of 2002, on page 20,
see Discoveries revisited under artemis, I related numbers
(and elements) to increasing realms:
| 1 |
(fire) |
individual imagination |
| 2 |
(air) |
logical consequences |
| 3 |
(water) |
collective wishes |
| 4 |
(earth) |
reality |
In astrology and similar fields, 1+3 have more weight than
2+4: Collective, more or less mainstream views plus individual
pet theories outweigh logic and reality, which have mainly
assisting roles like to provide accurate calculations of planetary
positions. Conversely, in exact science, 2+4 have more
weight than 1+3: Theory plus experiments have precedence
over individual imagination and collective wishes.
See also Robert Pirsig’s static qualities nature-biology-social-intellect-mystic
in Lila, with maybe the main difference that
the ‘air’ layer would be ‘social’ instead of ‘logic’, which likely
reveals bias in me (and him) regarding how to interpret the
element air, more as communication and social relations or
more as abstract airy logic with premises and conclusions.
A five that transcends reality could also be added above, plus
6 to 9 for transformations of air-fire-earth-water, 10 for
transformation of transformation, etc. See e.g. the chapter about
Capricorn in my book Elementary Star Signs (2018), which
might have been easier to promote if titled Transformations
between the Classical Elements Fire, Air, Water and Earth in
the Twelve Signs of the (Western Tropical) Zodiac, if only
maybe I had planets in Air signs in my birth chart and thus
better developed promotional/marketing skills ? ;)
-
Xuan near the end of the first section of the Tao Te Ching
is literally a very dark red. Maybe black/white for earth/heaven
and xuan for the secret of life, symbolized by the female sex,
the ninth gate to the female body, even Tao itself ?
The Han dynasty Tai Xuan Jing, a fusion of Tao Te Ching
and I Ching, an oracle with 81 tegragrams made of unbroken,
once and twice broken lines, standing for heaven, earth and
‘human being’, might also be worth a closer look.
-
In August 2015, I assigned Greek goddesses to pairs of
elements and moon phases: Artemis/Hecate to (re-) birth/death
at new moon as fire around water, Hera (and Clotho) to
growth as a young woman or girl at the first quarter as air
around earth, Aphrodite (and Lachesis) to bloom as a mature
woman at full moon as water around fire, and Athena (and
Atropos) to withering as an old woman at the last quarter as
earth around air. Artemis/Hecate would thus contain both
first and fifth element, with 2-3-4 in between, and elements
would touch as on the Möbius Strip.
[image]
In the introduction of The Greeks Myths, Robert Graves flips
Athena and Hera in terms of assignment to maiden/crone, as
I also did intermittently, so maybe both, yin-yang-style ?
-
Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly dream:
“Once Chuang Tzu dreamt that he was a butterfly,
a fluttering butterfly who felt at ease and happy
and knew nothing of Chuang Tzu. Suddenly he woke
up: Then he was again really and truly Chuang Tzu.
Now I do not know whether Chuang Tzu dreamt that
he was a butterfly or whether the butterfly dreamt
that it was Chuang Tzu, even though there is
certainly a difference between Chuang Tzu and the
butterfly. This is how the change of things is.”
(translated by me from the Wilhelm translation to German)
The same day I had first quoted the dream here,
on the streets of Zürich, two butterflies on a truck,
21 Sep 2016 at 13:34.
White, red, black, a little yellow, even a little circle and her.
(In Apuleius’ encounter with Isis, it is left open whether
he was “just dreaming” or “it really happened”.)
[image]
The image is by Elena Vizerskaya (Getty Images 108350631);
I bought the rights to use it, too, just to be safe.
-
(The walking cat of the metamorphosis section came to me
at Delphi in Greece on Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at about
13:09, ate some of my food, a dry pretzel and salmon jerky,
then, after a few burps (still a kid) and playing a little, took
a nap of about 20 minutes on my lap, then left roughly in the
direction of the Athena Pronoia temple, where I had been a
bit earlier. During these few minutes there were no doubts
what to do and felt so good, like having a child to care for.
Was the AC maybe even an oracle for the AC of π, with the
moon maybe late at glowing quincunxes, or early spring with
almost shared progressed moons ? Or a triangle with wings
or maybe two lovers strolling through a secluded walk ?)
[image]
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