The Struggle within the Four Elements: where Nature Hides its Seeds

Indeed, the term “four alchemical elements” implies their laboratory interaction, or “struggle” as alchemists call it. The philosophical expansion of the four individual elements is surprisingly diverse and has already been discussed in their pages: Air Alchemy, the Dust; Air Alchemy, the Fabric; Water Alchemy; Fire Alchemy; and Earth Alchemy.

The four alchemical elements “fire, air, water and earth” are not the same as ordinary fire, air, water and earth because the former cannot exist alone but only in constant operational interaction with each other.

If for iatrochemists one can speak without too many periphrases of different states of matter to be worked, for theurgists it is a question of more conceptual elements. Alchemists are in the middle.

According to ancient alchemists, the earth element contains everything, the water element flows, the air element bounces, and the fire element determines. Fire commands the air, which shakes the water and acts on the earth.

Put another way: the water element is everything that flows, therefore also air; the air element communicates spiritual forces to the water element, therefore it is the sonic force or acoustic phenomena; the earth element is form; the fire element represents the beginning of everything, the input.

Simply put, the four elements theory is about exact proportions and “fields of influence” that have always been kept secret. If in Alchemy the theory of elements concerns exact proportions, in Theurgy we speak instead of “fields of influence”. In both cases, the “volumes” or “weights” have always been kept secret.  Just to give an example, legend has it that one of the builders of one of the three pyramids on the Giza plateau was desperately looking for the lost number of “rooms”.

Ancient chemists imagined the Rotation of the Elements as a rising and falling inside the vessel. To be more precise, the movements inside the vessel were the Elements. For chemistry to work, all the elements had to transform into the element with which they had certain qualities in common. For example, a direct transmutation of Water into Fire was impossible, since they had nothing in common, but Water could transform into Air, which shared the fluidity. The transmutation of the Elements was called Rotation.

Ancient chemists said that there was a struggle between Water and Fire, because they had nothing in common. Yet, only these two could resolve and condense each other precisely because they usually did not get along. For this reason, the four Elements were traditionally divided into feminine and masculine, and their interaction was called “the struggle of love”.

Alchemists defined the Solving stage as the reduction of bodies as into Spirits, while the Coagulation was the reduction of Spirits into bodies. And so the Body had to be spiritual, and the Spirit corporeal. Both had then to transform into a philosophical compound, as they called it. The Fixation of volatility was a matter of fundamental knowledge: not only must the philosophical volatile matter be fixed, but the fixed must, at all times, be able to return to volatility. In this way, all the unwanted matter was discharged. Eventually, the volatile matter was able to dissolve, and the fixed matter had the same property. This was a real peculiarity of alchemical compounds.

The secret of the production of beer is a reduction by fermentation. That implies an extensive dissolution of the raw material and, therefore, a spiritualization. Because in putrefaction, the elements fight each other; that is, they open up to each other. Then the air or sky comes out, surrounding any body, just as the sky does the earth. When the sky is fixed, the earth is born from the fixation. These same principles can also be extended to the production of glass.

According to both iatrochemists and alchemists,  the Earth element was almost always the starting element. It should be soon turned into the flowing element Water, i.e., liquid or vapor, but in the end, the latter will have to be fixed again, and eternally, in the element Earth. It was said that the earth element swallowed everything, as the big fish ate the small one.

IAAT stands for Ignis/fire, Aire/air, Aqua/Water, and Terra/earth. The ancient alchemist did note that during the solve phase ( destruction of the raw matter starting from the element Earth) inside the distilling flask, the more volatile parts tended to rise to the top. In contrast, the less volatile ones stood in the lower parts. So the matter’s composition took the IAAT acronym during the solve phase. But they also noted that during the coagula phase ( reunification in a new purified and incorruptible element Earth), the composition tended to reverse as the “philosophical” element Terra/earth was no more lying on the bottom. So the real masterly operation is to reverse the I.A.A.T in T.A.A.I.

The best raw matter was the one originally containing all four elements. But it was also the most difficult to handle.

True. The elements theory also concerned the collection of raw materials. The arrangement of the elements in the matter is different due to many factors: the time of day, year, harvesting, and processing systems. For instance, in the dew called male, it was considered more fire; in the female dew, there was more air.

This statement can be misleading. It seems that the ancient alchemists taught that the composition of the elements can color a body differently during the workings. For example, gold would tend to redness due to the predominance of the Fire element in it, while silver would tend to whiteness due to the predominance of the Earth element. In reality, this phenomenon would only be just an initial impression, because in the main work the rotation of the colors is given by the rotations of the Mercurius in its phases of black-white-red which have little to do with materials that are now rather degraded and unrecognizable from their initial chemical purity.

True. During the alchemical works, especially in the second-main work, alchemists can see the rotation of elements rendered through color rotation.

True. As strange as it might seem, the alchemists claim to extracted the sky from the earth, as the element Earth contained the element Fire, and the element Water contained the element Air. According to alchemical pragmatism, the celestial elements could be extracted from the terrestrial ones. 

The alchemists told of themselves that they mainly worked with Earth and Water (which, according to them,  defined all that was flowing, even vapors and fumes). In some cases, they also said to work with Air (conjunction between earth and sky). The element Fire was deemed invisible and did appear at a specific time. 

In short, alchemists mainly dealt with the Elements Earth and Water, which were visible to them and tangible. At the same time, Air and Fire were considered rather impalpable. However, even Earth and Water could not be entirely considered terrestrial, and the invisible Air and Fire entirely celestial.

True, we can say that the theory of rotation of hot/cold and dry/wet fits into the theory of the four elements.

Not only the rotation of the four elements, but also the rotation of hot/cold and dry/wet is fundamentally, and alchemically, a rotation of changes of state. We will see how essential these are in the exit of Mercurius from the raw material.

Fire moves Air which moves Water which moves Earth. Finally, Earth, in the Philosophers’ Stone, “cages” Fire: the initial “swelled” spark grew in ray, then it moved everything that flows and finally the Stone sounded in the Last Cooking (see also Alchemy Resounds).