I want to talk a little bit about an old Medieval science called Humorism. The idea was that humours are four different fluids in the body, which must be evenly balanced for optimum health. The balance of these humours also affected your mood or state of mind. It was thought that people could be born with a certain imbalance of the humours, and this imbalance caused certain physical traits as well as personality traits. The type of food you ate was believed to affect the balance of your humours, and so certain diets were recommended to treat different imbalances. The four humours are associated with the four classical elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. This belief, originating in ancient Greece, was also taught in India. The theory dominated Western medical thinking for more than 2000 years. "Dragons" Fire - Choleric People with this temperament tend to be egocentric and extroverted. They may be excitable, impulsive, and restless, with reserves of aggression, ...

This is my diagram of the "wheel of the year" based on the data for my location. This is something I recommend everyone does - find out the meteorological data for where you live. I have written down the average temperature, rainfall, and sunshine for each month of the year.This has me thinking about the wheel of the year in Elemental terms. It was Aristotle that proposed that each of the Elements has two qualities each. Earth is cold and dry, because it represents molecules moving at their slowest, locked into a solid position. As the molecules warm up, they become more fluid. Water is cold and wet because it represents the liquid state. Air is hot and wet because it represents the water molecules evaporating upwards as they are heated. Fire is hot and dry because it represents the molecules in their ionised state. So, looking at the wheel of the year we can see the hot, cold, dry and wet quarters, which can indicate the Elemental symbolism of the seasons. We are current...

Last month, I finished reading Practical Elemental Magick by Sorita d’Este and David Rankine. There were some interesting facts in there, and this is a topic that I love to explore because when you look into the different beliefs that were held in the past you find a great amount of variety. This lead me to further analyse my own take on the elements. I drew the following diagram to show how I see the classical elements. To me, the elements represent the four fundamental states of matter. At the top of the scale, we have fire, which represents the plasma state of matter. Other examples of matter in a plasma state are lightning, electric sparks, the Sun and stars. When a plasma is deionised, it becomes gas, which is represented by the element of air. The air we breathe is formed of several types of gases, such as nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide. When gas condenses it becomes liquid, which is represented by water. Other examples of liquids include bodily f...

I have been working on this little painting, it's not finished yet, because I'm not sure how it's going to develop, but my thinking behind it is a diagram of Aristotle's classical elements. This photo isn't brilliant, so what what looks like a black area is actually blue and purple. I am trying to combine the idea of the classical elements, with the scientific states of matter, and the spectrum of visible light. Aristotle  was one of the first to publicly hypothesize about the nature of light, proposing that light is a disturbance in the element  air  (that is, it is a wave-like phenomenon). On the other hand,  Democritus  argued that all things in the universe, including light, are composed of indivisible sub-components (light being some form of solar atom). Today, the theory of  wave–particle duality  postulates that all  particles  exhibit both  wave  and  particle  properties. In the diagram above I have comp...