In brief, fire and air are considered active, like yang in Chinese philosophy, while air and earth are considered passive, like yin in Chinese philosophy.Īrroyo also points out that Greek philosophy is similarly split into Apollonian and Dionysian expressions of energy.
Stephen Arroyo in Astrology, Psychology, and The Four Elements gives a few different ways for understanding these pairings. Within the four classical elements, air is often paired with fire, and water is often paired with earth. They are a bit different from the five elements used in Chinese medicine and feng shui – which are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water – but the basic idea of understanding the world in terms of energy is similar. However, the four classical elements are still worth knowing for their use in more intuitive fields like Western astrology and Tarot. In the present context, an element is a basic substance that is made of atoms of only one kind and cannot be separated by ordinary chemical means into simpler substances – and a molecule of water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Chemistry now uses the periodic table of elements, which currently has 118 elements, and the way they are understood is not quite how the four classical elements were understood.
Today, there is a much more detailed understanding of the physical building blocks of life. It then remained influential for many centuries thereafter. Once the four elements of fire, earth, air, and water were decided upon, the idea was expanded by other writers such as Aristotle. The quartet of fire, earth, air, and water as the basis of all things was first codified by the philosopher Empedocles in the fifth century BCE, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Įarlier Greek philosophers had wondered amongst themselves whether just one of the four, like air or water, was the foundation of everything. The idea of the four classical elements dates back to ancient Greece.
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