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Classical element, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many philosophies and worldviews have a set of classical elements believed to reflect the simplest essential parts and principles of which anything consists or upon which the constitution and fundamental powers of anything are based. Most frequently, classical elements refer to ancient beliefs inspired by natural observation of the phases of matter. Historians trace the evolution of modern theory pertaining to the chemical elements, as well as chemical compounds and mixtures of natural substances to medieval, Islamic and Greek models. Many concepts once thought to be analogous, such as the Chinese Wu Xing, are now understood more figuratively.




Classical elements in Babylonia
The concept of the four classical elements in the Western tradition originates from Babylonian mythology. The Enûma Eliš, a text written between the 18th and 16th centuries BC, describes four cosmic elements: the sea, earth, sky, and wind.

Classical elements in Greece

Four Classical Elements
Plato characterizes the elements as being pre-Socratic in origin from a list created by the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (ca. 450 BC). Empedocles called these the four "roots" (ιζματα, rhizōmata). Plato seems to have been the first to use the term "element (στοιχεον, stoicheion)" in reference to air, fire, earth, and water. The ancient Greek word for element, stoicheion (from stoicheo, "to line up") meant "smallest division (of a sun-dial), a syllable", as the composing unit of an alphabet it could denote a letter and the smallest unit from which a word is formed.

According to Aristotle in his On Generation and Corruption:
    * Air is primarily wet and secondarily hot.
    * Fire is primarily hot and secondarily dry.
    * Earth is primarily dry and secondarily cold.
    * Water is primarily cold and secondarily wet.



Classical elements in Hinduism

Buddhist elements


The Buddha's teaching of the four elements does predate Greek teaching of the same four elements. This is possibly explained by the fact that he sent out 60 arahants to the known world to spread his teaching; however it differs in the fact that the Buddha taught that the four elements are false and that form is in fact made up of much smaller particles which are constantly changing.[citation needed]


Tibetan elements


Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche states that


Chinese elements

Although it is usually translated as "element", the Chinese word xing literally means something like "changing states of being", "permutations" or "metamorphoses of being".[8] In fact Sinologists cannot agree on one single translation. The Chinese conception of "element" is therefore quite different from the Western one. The Western elements were seen as the basic building blocks of matter. The Chinese, by contrast, were seen as ever changing and moving forces or energies—one translation of wu xing is simply "the five changes".


In Taoism there is a similar system of elements, which includes metal and wood, but excludes air, which is replaced with qi, which is a force or energy rather than an element. In Chinese philosophy the universe consists of heaven and earth, heaven being made of qi and earth being made of the five elements (in the Chinese view, the attributes and properties of the Western and Indian Air element are equivalent to that of Wood[citation needed], where the element of Ether is often seen as a correspondent to Metal[citation needed]). The five major planets are associated with and named after the elements: Venus 金星 is Metal (金), Jupiter 木星 is Wood (木), Mercury 水星 is Water (水), Mars 火星 is Fire (火), and Saturn 土星 is Earth (土). Additionally, the Moon represents Yin (陰), and the Sun 太陽 represents Yang (陽). Yin, Yang, and the five elements are recurring themes in the I Ching, the oldest of Chinese classical texts which describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy. The five elements also play an important part in Chinese astrology and the Chinese form of geomancy known as Feng shui

Japanese elements
Japanese traditions use a set of elements called the 五大 (go dai, literally "five great"). These five are earth, water, fire, wind/air, and void. These came from Buddhist beliefs; the classical Chinese elements (五行, go gyô) are also prominent in Japanese culture, especially to the influential Neo-Confucianists during the Edo period.

    * Earth represented things that were solid.
    * Water represented things that were liquid.
    * Fire represented things that destroyed.
    * Air represented things that moved.
    * Heaven represented things not of our everyday life.

Elements in Medieval alchemy
The elemental system used in Medieval alchemy was developed by the Arabic alchemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān and others. His original system consisted the four classical elements found in the ancient Greek traditions (air, earth, fire and water), in addition to two philosophical elements: sulphur, ‘the stone which burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. The three metallic principles: sulphur to flammability or combustion, mercury to volatility and stability, and salt to solidity. became the tri prima of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who reasoned that Aristotle’s four element theory appeared in bodies as three principles. Paracelsus saw these principles as fundamental, and justified them by recourse to the description of how wood burns in fire. Mercury included the cohesive principle, so that when it left in smoke the wood fell apart. Smoke described the volatility (the mercury principle), the heat-giving flames described flammability (sulphur), and the remnant ash described solidity (salt).

Modern elements
The Aristotelian tradition and medieval Alchemy eventually gave rise to modern scientific theories and new taxonomies. By the time of Antoine Lavoisier, for example, a list of elements would no longer refer to classical elements. The classical elements correspond more closely to four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

Modern science recognizes classes of elementary particles which have no substructure, (or rather, particles that aren't made of other particles), and composite particles having substructure, (particles made of other particles). The Standard Model of quantum mechanics defines three classes of elementary subatomic particles: quarks and leptons, (matter-like particles), and gauge bosons (energy-like force carriers). Quarks are divided into six types: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charm; and leptons are similarly divided into six types: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau and tau neutrino. The types of force carriers include: photon, W and Z boson, gluon and some quantification of a Higgs boson.

Elements in western astrology and tarot

In divinatory tarot, the suits of cups, swords, batons/wands, and discs/coins are said to correspond to water, air, fire, and earth respectively.

- Classical Element, Wikipedia.

Subpages (4): Air Earth Fire Water