Here I am again on Saturday afternoon.  We just received a call from a nice lady looking for a New Year’s cottage.  Something with a hot tub, and maybe a fireplace.  We searched and searched, but everything was booked.  “I guess I just think that the hot tub and fireplace go together,” she lamented.

The human mind is apparently drawn to manichaean constructions of this nature—the species has a distinct tendency to juxtapose seemingly incompatible ideas with ease.  Classical Greek philosophers believed that all materials were created through the proper ratios of four elements—Earth, Fire, Air, and Water (some thinkers later included a fifth, known as Aether, Idea, or Quintessence).  Each element was believed to exist in rough opposition to another (i.e. Water versus Air, Air versus Earth).  Bringing these into proper alignment was critical to everything from personal health to the balance of the universe, and was equated with harmony throughout the cosmos.   The Greeks even attempted to relate this system to celestial phenomena, resulting in the association of Zodiacal constellations with the four elements.

Needless to say, Socrates and his intellectual heirs lived in a simpler time well before the dawn of modern chemical elements.  For their purposes, this system was a perfectly elegant system of describing the observable world.  One person, the “laughing philosopher” Democritus, correctly presaged modern atomic theory.  Many of his contemporaries instead judged his ideas ludicrous and thought him to be insane.  This reaction characterized the ongoing human obsession with simple, all-encompassing “theories of everything.”

China produced a similar, although subtler, approach to the problem of elements.  Here, traditional thought proclaimed five “phases”—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.  Rather than following the oppositional structure of Greek elements, Chinese Phases are considered interrelated–each generates one partner and overcoming another (i.e. Water creates Wood and extinguishes Fire).  This system neatly paraphrases organic processes and accommodates the iron-age mind.  The inclusion of Wood and Metal also shows increasing sophistication which marks biological and man-made materials among changeless natural substances.

The Chinese phases, like their Western counterparts, were nevertheless strung like cobwebs between the disciplines in an attempt to knit together all knowledge.  Chinese music associates phases with the five-note pentatonic scale, a remarkably widespread and functional scale common throughout folkmusics of the world.  In medicine, the phases conveniently ruled the five senses, various internal organs, and successive stages of life.  The I Ching Book of Changes, a Confucian philosophical text, held that relationships between the phases influenced heavenly affairs and could be harnessed for purposes of fortune telling.  The martial art Xingyiquan instead connected the phases with aggressive bursts of controlled violence known by names such as Beng (“crushing”) or Pao (“pounding”).  Today, many of these principles are still found within the peaceful Qigong philosophy, although some groups who attach religious convictions the practices—the Falun Gong—have often been the targets of Communist crackdowns against “backward” or “dangerous” ideologies.

Perhaps the American Poet Robert Frost best described our preoccupation with primal substances.  In “Fire and Ice” (1920), frost characterizes the elemental forces of nature:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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