page_title: Classical element
section_title: Alchemy
hierarchical_section_title: Classical element / Post-classical history / Alchemy
caption_attribution_description: Original image description from the Deutsche Fotothek Theosophie &amp; Alchemie
context_page_description: Classical elements typically refer to the concepts of earth, water, air, fire, and aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Persia, Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had all similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to "air" as "wind" and the fifth element as "void". The Chinese Wu Xing system lists Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water, though these are described more as energies or transitions rather than as types of material.
  These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities. Some of these interpretations included atomism, but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature.
context_section_description: The elemental system used in Medieval alchemy was developed primarily by the Arab alchemist Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber). His system consisted of the four classical elements of air, earth, fire, and water, in addition to two philosophical elements: sulphur, characterizing the principle of combustibility, "the stone which burns"; and mercury, characterizing the principle of metallic properties. They were seen by early alchemists as idealized expressions of irreducible components of the universe and are of larger consideration within philosophical alchemy.
  The three metallic principles—sulphur to flammability or combustion, mercury to volatility and stability, and salt to solidity—became the tria prima of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus. He reasoned that Aristotle's four element theory appeared in bodies as three principles. Paracelsus saw these principles as fundamental and justified them by recourse to the description of how wood burns in fire. Mercury included the cohesive principle, so that when it left in smoke the wood fell apart. Smoke described the volatility (the mercurial principle), the heat-giving flames described flammability (sulphur), and the remnant ash described solidity (salt).
caption: Seventeenth century alchemical emblem showing the four Classical elements in the corners of the image, alongside the tria prima on the central triangle
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