The four elements and their qualities in the first book

The first book of the De occulta philosophia begins with the foundations of nature. Before speaking of stones, plants or stars, Agrippa explains what the sensible world is made of: four elements, fire, air, water and earth, which he calls the first foundations of all corporeal things. This is the ancient physics of Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle, handed down by medieval scholasticism, which Agrippa takes up as the necessary starting point for any discussion of natural magic.

Primary qualities and mixtures

According to the Aristotelian doctrine Agrippa follows, each element possesses two qualities. Fire is hot and dry, air hot and moist, water cold and moist, earth cold and dry. Fire and earth stand at the extremes, while air and water act as mediators, because each shares a quality with its neighbours. From this web of likenesses and contraries arises the possibility that the elements can turn into one another.

Agrippa then distinguishes the virtues that derive directly from these primary qualities, such as heating, cooling, drying or moistening, from those that derive from them at second hand, such as softening, hardening or ripening. These are the manifest effects of things, explicable by reason and by the experience of physicians. The first book deals with them quickly, because the author's real interest lies elsewhere, in the virtues that escape this kind of explanation.

Three orders of elements

One of the most enigmatic chapters of the first book distinguishes three orders in which the elements may be considered. In the first order are the pure elements, which neither mix nor decay; in the second, the compound and changeable ones that make up bodies; in the third, elements still more mixed, to which Agrippa attributes a decisive role in the secrets of nature. The author alludes to these mysteries without fully explaining them, following the taste for reticence typical of Hermetic literature.

Elements in heaven, in spirits and in man

The most original part concerns the presence of the elements at every level of the cosmos. Agrippa maintains that they are found in the heavens, in the stars, in spirits, in angels and even in God, but differently at each level: in God as ideas, in the intelligences as powers, in the heavens as virtues, in earthly things as gross forms. Thus the Sun is said to be fiery in nature and the Moon watery, and the signs of the zodiac too are divided into four elemental triplicities.

The same holds for living things. Among animals some are assigned to earth, others to water, like fish, others to air, like birds; to fire Agrippa assigns creatures such as the salamander, which according to an ancient belief recorded by Pliny could live amid the flames. In man the elements correspond to the humours and temperaments, and even to the faculties of the soul, following a correspondence that runs through all the medical thought of the time.

The doctrine of the elements is therefore far more than an introductory chapter. It is the grammar that allows Agrippa to connect the earthly world with the higher ones, because everything carries within it a trace of fire, air, water or earth. On this basis are built the classifications, analogies and sympathies that fill the following pages of the first book.