The Four Elements in Spiritual Herbalism
In all ancient traditions of herbal medicine, we find that people across time and place have used natural language symbols as a way to understand wellness, disease, harmony, and transformation. Taoist herbalists have their five wuxing elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Metal, and Wood along with the forces of Yin and Yang. The Ayurvedic tradition has a slightly different grouping of five elements including Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether which combine to make the three primary doshas of Pitta, Kapha, and Vata. Humoral medicine has the four essential fluids blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Each of these systems is approaching the same goal of healing using different sets of language symbols- ways we can look beyond the reductionist set of symptoms so common on modern medicine and pop herbalism and into the energetics, expressions, and even personality of how disease states show up in an individual.
In this post I’d like to share with you a bit about how the four elements find their way into my own practice as a spiritual herbalist and how you might think of your own experiences of disharmony in these languages as a way to know them better.
I would be remiss not to start this chat out with some major appreciation to my favorite of the ancient Greek philosophers, Empedocles. Born in the 5th century on what is now Sicily, he had some radical ideas that I really resonate with. More importantly, he is the first of the documented philosophers to speak about the universe being made up of four essential roots; Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Empedocles taught that everything and everyone in existence is a unique combination of these four building blocks of life, and that the whole of the cosmos is propelled by the tension between the forces of love and strife, or what I like to call cosmos and chaos.
From Empedocles, the roots got their name of elements with Plato as they went on to form an important part of the medicine of Hippocrates. As Rome and Christianity moved into the British Isles, they brought these elemental concepts with them in both cosmogony and medicine which is why we can glean traces of them in wortcunning practices later on.
The four primordial elements play a crucial role in my approach to clinical herbalism and wortcunning. They provide an incredibly intuitive language model that both me and my clients can instantly access as we explore disease states together- one that allows us to radically honor the individual experience and the unique path back to wellness.
For example: when someone comes to me with chronic headaches aggravated by certain kinds of stress, I instantly throw out the general definition of the term headache because my client’s headache and the broad-spectrum definition of headache may not be the same thing. Ultimately, disease names are just a shortcut to a set of common symptoms- and I generally find that most people are not very common!
So, with this individual’s headache I am more concerned with where things are happening, how they feel, timeline and rhythms, self-soothing and aggravating factors, and the like. And, to really dig into this I like to encourage people to use the elemental language model. For example, we could define a headache in the following ways:
Dull, throbbing pain that accompanies a frozen shoulder
Sharp, stabbing pain that’s unpredicable and frustrating
Pain moves from one place to another, and gets worse with exposure to light or heat
Headaches come on as a response to intense emotions; crying will always cause one
While these explanations seem pretty standard, for the elemental herbalist they conceal language that can give insight into the deeper root causes of the imbalance. The first case is an excess of the Earth element or a deficiency of Fire. The second is an excess of Fire or a deficiency of Earth, the third is an Airy condition or one that lacks Water fluidity, and the final case is an excess of turbid Water or a lack of Air.
What does this tell us about an herbal remedy and protocol? Well, nothing! But what it does do is help the experienced herbalist narrow down the list of herbs that might be the right fit for the individual by using elemental language to refine the herbal selection and guide the writing of a formula.
You can crack open any herb book, turn to the section on headaches, and find a list of 15 or 20 excellent herbs that all have something to do with headaches. But, not all of these herbs are right for all kinds of headaches, not all herbs are right for the unique constitution of the person with the headaches, and not all of the herbs conduct, move, or transform the head/neck area in a way that makes sense for the pattern of those unique headaches. So, we must find the right herbs, or ideally the right herb that speaks with 100% rightness to the person, their headaches, and their path.
So, in my practice the elements help by:
Giving me and my client an intuitive, shared language with which we can explore the nuances of their experiences
Giving me insight into how best to work with the individual based on their most prevailing elemental temperament
Giving us symbols to use when looking at what is excessive, deficient, or disregulated in the whole person
Showing us the energetic pathway that leads to the disease state and away from it, back toward the person’s unique version of sacred center
Providing one level of many nuances to help choose the best herb or synergistic formulation of herbs to the individual
Showing which adjunct therapies might be beneficial to the individual
Giving insight into how the disturbance of center happened and how one might avoid it in the future
As you can see, this simple language of elemental herbalism has become a crucial tool of connection, assessment, remedy writing, and protocol crafting for every person I work with. Whether our focus is on more clinical herbal protocols or spiritual herbalism and plant spirit work, the elements always have a place in my clinic!
Check out this class I just posted on this topic where we go further into the ways of the elements and herbal medicine…
