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Liber I · Alchemy

Liber I · Alchemy · Chapter V: History of Alchemy

Empedocles and the Four Elements: Fire, Air, Water and Earth

Empedocles and the four elements: how the Sicilian philosopher's four roots, Love and Strife shaped Western alchemy, medicine, astrology and ritual magic.

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Empedocles of Akragas (c. 494–c. 434 BCE) was the Greek philosopher-poet who first taught that everything in the world is made from four eternal "roots": fire, air, water and earth. Moved together by Love and driven apart by Strife, these roots mix in different proportions to form every living and non-living thing. Renamed "elements" by Plato and systematised by Aristotle, Empedocles' scheme became the physical foundation of Western alchemy, medicine, astrology and ritual magic for some two thousand years.

Empedocles of Akragas: Life and Legend§

Akragas, on the south coast of Sicily, was one of the richest Greek cities of the fifth century BCE, and Empedocles belonged to one of its leading families. Ancient biographers, gathered by Diogenes Laertius in the third century CE, portray him as a democrat who helped dissolve an oligarchic council and, according to a report attributed to Aristotle, refused the offer of kingship. He was also remembered as an orator, a physician and a wonder-worker who wore a purple robe, a golden belt, a Delphic wreath and bronze sandals. Aristotle is said to have called him the inventor of rhetoric, and the sophist Gorgias was described as his pupil.

His surviving work consists of a few hundred lines quoted by later authors and some fifty more preserved on a papyrus in Strasbourg, published in 1999. Traditionally these lines are divided between two poems, On Nature and Purifications, though some scholars now think they belonged to a single work. In one famous passage he promises a disciple knowledge of remedies against illness and old age, power over winds and rain, and the ability to bring back the strength of a dead man from Hades. Such claims led the historian Peter Kingsley to argue that Empedocles stood in a tradition of Pythagorean magic and healing as much as in the history of rational philosophy.

The best-known legend tells that he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna to prove himself a god, and that the volcano threw back one of his bronze sandals. Ancient writers already doubted the story, and other accounts have him die in the Peloponnese. It inspired later writers from Horace to Hölderlin and Matthew Arnold's poem Empedocles on Etna (1852).

The Four Roots: Fire, Air, Water and Earth§

Empedocles wrote in response to Parmenides, who had argued that nothing can come from nothing or pass into nothing, so that real change is impossible. Empedocles accepted that what truly exists cannot be created or destroyed, but he multiplied it. There are four roots (rhizomata), each eternal and unchanging. What we call birth and death is only their mixing and separation.

He introduced the roots under divine names: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus (a name of Hades) and Nestis, a Sicilian water goddess whose tears moisten mortal things. Nestis is clearly water, but which god stands for which of the other roots was debated already in antiquity. The most common ancient reading made Zeus fire, Hera air and Aidoneus earth; Kingsley has argued that Aidoneus, lord of the underworld, stands for the volcanic fire beneath Sicily and Hera for earth. The divine names matter for the history of magic, because they present the elements as living, sacred powers, not inert stuff.

The roots combine in ratios. In one fragment Empedocles explains that bone is formed when earth receives two parts of water and four of fire, a recipe given in a kind of cosmic crucible. This idea, that the properties of a substance depend on the proportions of its elements, became fundamental to later chemistry and to the alchemical belief that a metal could be changed by altering its balance.

Love and Strife: The Cosmic Cycle§

Four roots alone do not explain motion, so Empedocles added two forces. Love (Philotes, also called Aphrodite) draws unlike things together; Strife (Neikos) drives them apart. Their alternating dominance produces an endless cycle. Under the complete rule of Love, all the roots are blended in a perfect sphere, the Sphairos, still and divine. As Strife enters, the sphere breaks up, the roots separate, and worlds and living things form in the intermediate stages. Under the complete rule of Strife the four masses would lie wholly apart, until Love begins to draw them together again.

Empedocles described the emergence of living beings with strange vividness: heads without necks and arms without shoulders wandering separately, then joining at random into creatures such as ox-headed people, of which only viable combinations survived. Modern readers have been tempted to see an anticipation of natural selection, though his concern was cosmological rather than biological. The cycle of union and separation also anticipates a basic alchemical rhythm, later summed up in the motto solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate.

Purifications: Reincarnation and the Exiled Daimon§

The second strand of Empedocles' work is religious. He taught that a divine spirit, a daimon, which has stained itself with bloodshed or broken an oath, is exiled from the company of the blessed for thirty thousand seasons and must pass through every kind of mortal form. He claimed to have been a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish. Because the souls of kin may dwell in animals, he condemned blood sacrifice and the eating of meat, picturing a father who unknowingly slaughters his own son transformed into an animal.

These teachings link him to Pythagoras and to the Orphic movement, discussed in our article on Greek religion and the mysteries, and to Greek ideas surveyed in our guide to reincarnation and the afterlife. For Empedocles the physical and the spiritual were one system: the same Love that unites the elements is the power the purified soul must serve. He presented himself, at the end of his cycle of births, as a god among mortals.

From Roots to Elements: Plato and Aristotle§

The word "element" itself came later. Plato, in the Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), called the four stoicheia, a word that also meant the letters of the alphabet, and gave each a geometrical form: the tetrahedron for fire, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water and the cube for earth. Because the first three are built from the same triangles, they could break down and recombine into one another, while earth stood apart.

Aristotle made the decisive change. In On Generation and Corruption he paired the elements with two pairs of opposed qualities: fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water cold and wet, earth cold and dry. Since each element shares one quality with its neighbour, one can turn into another by exchanging a single quality, as water heated becomes vapour. Aristotle added a fifth element, the aether, for the incorruptible heavens, later called the quintessence. In the Meteorologica he also proposed that metals and minerals form underground from two exhalations, one moist and vaporous, one dry and smoky.

Here lay the theoretical basis of alchemy. If all matter is composed of the same elements in varying proportions and qualities, then lead and gold differ only in balance, and a skilled art might correct the one into the other.

The Four Elements in Alchemy, Astrology and Magic§

Greek alchemists in Roman Egypt, such as Zosimus of Panopolis around 300 CE, worked within this framework. Arabic alchemy, especially the writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, turned Aristotle's two exhalations into the sulphur–mercury theory of metals and tried to measure the "balance" of qualities in each substance. Latin alchemists inherited both ideas; the Philosopher's Stone was often described as a perfect harmony of the four elements. Paracelsus added his three principles of salt, sulphur and mercury and peopled each element with spirits: salamanders, sylphs, undines and gnomes. Their symbols are explained in our guide to alchemical symbols.

Medicine absorbed the scheme through the Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man (c. 400 BCE), whose four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, were later aligned with the elements by Galen. Astrology grouped the twelve signs into four triplicities of fire, earth, air and water, a framework developed in Hellenistic astrology and still universal today.

In Renaissance magic Cornelius Agrippa opened his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) with the four elements as the foundation of all natural magic, as discussed in our article on Agrippa. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built its first grades on the elements, attributed them to the four tarot suits and to the points of the pentagram, and modern Wicca calls the four quarters of the circle by elemental names. These attributions are largely nineteenth- and twentieth-century systematisations, but they stand on Empedocles' foundation. The four elements lost their scientific standing only with Robert Boyle's The Sceptical Chymist (1661) and Lavoisier's new list of chemical elements in 1789. In the symbolic language of alchemy and magic they never did.

Frequently asked questions§

Did Empedocles invent the four elements?§

He was the first to teach that fire, air, water and earth together are the eternal building blocks of everything. Earlier thinkers had singled out one primary substance, such as Thales' water or Anaximenes' air. Empedocles called them "roots"; the word "element" comes from Plato.

What are Love and Strife in Empedocles?§

They are the two cosmic forces that move the four roots. Love unites different things and Strife separates them. Their alternating dominance produces an endless cycle, from a perfect divine sphere to complete separation and back again.

How did the four elements influence alchemy?§

Through Aristotle, who linked each element to two qualities, the theory implied that elements and substances could be transformed into one another. Alchemists built on this to argue that base metals could be perfected into gold, and they kept the four elements as a central symbolic framework.

Did Empedocles really jump into Mount Etna?§

The story is a legend recorded by later biographers, who also mention other accounts of his death. It probably grew from his own claims to divinity. Most historians treat it as myth.

Sources and further reading§