I weighed in on a question recently about directional attributions for ceremonial magic. It was a question that resonated with me, as this is something that I got hung up on for quite a while in my own practice. There are four cardinal directions. There are four classical elements. When building rituals, it seems obvious one can be assigned to the other in a meaningful way. But how do we do that?
In Wiccan and Neopagan circles, the attributions are generally based on time cycles. East corresponds to springtime, which is assigned to the element of Air. South is assigned to summer and Fire. West gets autumn and Water, and north gets winter and Earth. These directional associations broadly line up with the climate of Europe: moving south means getting warmer, moving north means getting colder, moving west means running into the Atlantic ocean. Under this system, proceeding clockwise around a circle takes you through the progression of a year. It also allows for a nice resonance between natural time cycles. South can be associated not just with summer, but with the full moon in the lunar month, and with noon in the day/night cycle. It’s all fairly tidy.
Transitioning from a neopagan context to Golden Dawn ritual magic, I encountered the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. This ritual uses the same attributions, but layers on elemental archangels. Raphael for Air in the east, Michael for Fire in the south, Gabriel for Water in the West, and Uriel for Earth in the north. It felt very familiar.
But the more I dug into ritual magic, the less tidy it became. Franz Bardon puts the elements in diametric pairs, with the heat of Fire in counterpoint to the chill of Water, and the heaviness of Earth in counterpoint to the flightiness of Air. Under our first system of attributions, these elements land next to their opposites, rather than across from them.1
Even within the Golden Dawn system, there are other rituals – such as the Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram – that use different attributions. The correspondences in this case are linked to the wheel of the zodiac. Here east is associated with Aries, and thus with Fire. North is associated with Cancer, and therefore Water. West is linked with Libra and Air, and south with Capricorn and Earth. For Kabbalists, this also opens up links with the letters of the Tetragrammaton – the unpronounceable four letter name of God.2
This latter system is the one Agrippa uses in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy.3 He places Fire, summer, and the archangel Michael in the east; Water, winter, and the archangel Gabriel in the north; Air, spring, and the archangel Raphael in the West; and Earth, autumn, and the archangel Uriel in the south. Which, while very clean from a zodiacal standpoint, means our seasons are no longer adjacent. Progressing through the year isn’t a circle, it’s an hourglass shape.
Even if you like this ordering of the elements, it means addressing them in Tetragrammaton order moves you counterclockwise around your circle, which many magicians don’t like. You can opt to still proceed clockwise, and address first Fire, then Earth, Air, and Water (this is the approach taken in the Golden Dawn’s Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram), or you can flip it, placing Water in the south and Earth in the north, so proceeding clockwise still takes you through the four Kabbalistic worlds in manifestation order.
All of which is to say that there are nearly as many different ways to assign elements to the cardinal directions as there are possible permutations. And each of them has their pros and their cons. That bugged me.
I wanted there to be a right answer. I wanted a single, unified model that would fit neatly into everything I was trying to do. Which was maybe naive of me, in retrospect. But I spent a lot of mental effort wrestling with it, and trying different configurations to discover which one was correct.
What ultimately helped me move past it was a recognition that the map is not the territory. We build models to allow us to interface with the universe in an ordered and sensible way, but at the end of the day they’re still just models. They are useful approximations which describe a world that is more detailed, nuanced, and strange than we can possibly comprehend.
Which set of elemental correspondences is ultimately correct? It’s sort of like asking which map is more correct, a road atlas or a geological survey map. Neither. Both. It very much depends on what it is you’re doing. Navigating a car? A road atlas is just the thing to help you find your way.4 Looking for minerals? The atlas is pretty much useless.
Which brings us (at long last) to the practical advice I have for mapping elements onto the cardinal directions. If you’re working with an established ritual, such as the LBRP, use whatever the standard attributions are. Even if they don’t match what you use in other workings. Rituals build up momentum though repeated use, and by following the standard forms you can capitalize on that momentum. If you’re building your own rituals, start with whatever the standard attributions are for the tradition you’re working in. If there isn’t a single standard, use whatever set makes the most sense to you in your own practice.
And don’t get too hung up on there being a right answer. We’re all just building mental ships to ferry ourselves across the vasty deeps. None of them are real, but some of them are useful anyways.
- Indeed, I worked for a while in a Heathen current that altered this. Water/Ice/Niflheim was placed in the north opposite Fire/Muspelheim in the south, with Air and Earth distributed to the east and west respectively. Projected on the same seasonal cycle, this links Earth with autumn and harvest and Water with winter, which opens up some interesting avenues for exploration. ↩︎
- Starting in the east and writing counterclockwise (as one would in Hebrew), it links the force of the initial yod and the world of Atziluth to Fire in the east. The receptiveness of the superior heh and the world of Beri’ah match with Water in the north. The synthesis in vav and the world of Yetzirah map to Air in the west. And the ultimate manifestation down into the final heh, the world of Assiah, to Earth in the south. ↩︎
- Book II, Chapter VII, Of the number of Four, and the scale thereof. ↩︎
- I’m dating myself with this analogy. When was the last time anybody actually used a road atlas to find their way around? ↩︎
Comments
One response to “Elemental Directions: A Magician’s Compass”
That’s awesome! 👏
I must say, I even like this idea more so, it puts my mind at rest knowing that, the way it’s always done and the way its prescribed in the ritual IS the way that this ritual is done.
So many occult texts hold blinds and things of this nature to confuse the student, but knowing the Golden Dawn papers, it is assuring to know that, this is the way it’s done, and that’s good enough for me.
Meaning, it may not be the way I “would” do it, but they did it that way, and to operate in their system, that’s the way THEY do it too. So there’s really nothing wrong with that, and nothing to change, because it works. And it works for me too
It’s so important to realize the moment that’s build by everyone doing something a certain way like you mentioned. That by operating on the same frequency, ie. doing everything the same way, we’re all contributing to the strength and the potency of this ritual, that we can all draw strength from one another knowing that this is the way it’s done, and if you did it another way, then it’s not really ‘The LBRP it’s something else that you created, which there’s nothing wrong with
But it is no longer part of that system, it was born from it, but it became part of your own system if you’d chose to make it your own, don’t get me wrong!
Chaos magic is just as important and there’s nothing wrong with it at all, but it is what it is, it’s chaos magic and it’s its own thing, just like how Gold Dawn is its own thing, these are all their own systems and to operate within them they must be done in the manner prescribed.
Thank you so much
L.V.X.