The earth ele­ment is the densest of the prim­al ele­ments, almost the sum of the other, subtler ele­ments. Hid­den in the earth are the scent of roses, the taste of sweet fruit, the glow of fire­wood… The earth ele­ment is the emblem­at­ic embod­i­ment of mat­ter and of this world, as opposed to spir­it, which is the envoy of the heav­enly world. In nat­ur­al sci­ence the geo­centric world-view is con­sidered out­dated, yet from a myth­ic point of view it remains a rel­ev­ant pic­ture of the world: start­ing from him­self, man is able to inter­pret the world, whose spir­itu­al and prag­mat­ic centre is, after all, his own plan­et.

The per­son­i­fic­a­tion of the earth as a god­dess is found in many cul­tures, known among the Greeks as Gaia and among the Hindus as Bhumi. In Egypt, inter­est­ingly, the earth is rep­res­en­ted by a male deity, Geb, with Nut beside him as god­dess of the sky. Could this per­haps be the memory of an earli­er world cycle, of an age before a pole shift?

Earth Ele­ment

Peace­able Moth­er Earth, I pray, bear with me,

grant me strong sup­port, make my life fruit­ful,

grant sta­bil­ity and secur­ity!

Its qual­it­ies, such as for­bear­ance, recept­ive­ness, fer­til­ity, or inex­haust­ible cre­ativ­ity and sus­tain­ing power – all are traits of the fem­in­ine prin­ciple, and so it is easy to see why the expres­sion Moth­er Earth is found in so many lan­guages. An altern­at­ive branch of mod­ern sci­ence, draw­ing on the Gaia the­ory, looks on the Earth as a liv­ing organ­ism, one who responds sens­it­ively to any upset in the bal­ance.

As moth­er soil, the earth sug­gests through its fer­til­ity that every liv­ing being on the face of the Earth is, in a cer­tain sense, a modi­fic­a­tion of the earth ele­ment: the body was taken from dust, that is, from mat­ter, and to dust it returns. Let us note that the soul, for its part, comes from the Soul, and to the Soul it returns. The earth ele­ment under­goes a dis­tinct­ive meta­morph­os­is: at one time it is liv­ing, as the per­son­i­fied plan­et Earth, at anoth­er dead, as raw mater­i­al, then liv­ing again, as veget­a­tion, and then all these melt back into nature once more and, by their decay, serve the sprout­ing of new life. Humus, veget­a­tion and anim­als are only earth, just as stone, sand and desert are.

As nat­ive land, each region has a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that affects those who live there, the geni­us, the spir­it of the land radi­at­ing into the crops, into the water, into the men­tal­ity of the people. And as the Holy Land it not only denotes a par­tic­u­lar geo­graph­ic­al loc­a­tion but also points to the holi­ness of the whole plan­et, to its being per­vaded by divine bless­ing.

Every Her­met­ic teach­ing has depic­ted tel­lur­ic earth energy as a ser­pent, and its cos­mic coun­ter­part is the winged ser­pent, that is, the dragon. The druids likened the awaken­ing of magic­al power to the open­ing of the Dragon's eye. They held that the Earth was the body of the dragon. Along its net­work of veins, or more pre­cisely at the nodes of its energy chan­nels, arose the stone circles, the sanc­tu­ar­ies and the great power centres used by vari­ous peoples, which are the chakras and acu­punc­ture points of the body of the Earth, that is, of the Dragon.

But earth is not only a plan­et­ary ele­ment, it is also present in the micro­cosm of man. Among the chakras it is asso­ci­ated with the root chakra, and in the make-up of the body it stands for the skel­et­on, provid­ing resi­li­ence and sta­bil­ity.

When the earth ele­ment is in bal­ance in our body, we feel groun­ded and self-assured. We are reli­able, and we stand on our own feet. If the earth ele­ment gains the upper hand, we are tired, dull, lazy and gloomy. Our think­ing is pon­der­ous and lacks cre­ativ­ity. The neg­at­ive aspect of earth is held to be ignor­ance. If there is too little of the earth ele­ment in us, we exist without an anchor, we can­not find our place, we lose our foot­ing and are dis­con­ten­ted.