Nyx in the House of Night

hydrogen to unuoctium, should we just chuck all of those and replace them with only five?” While I’m sure many chemistry students would welcome the change wholeheartedly and do a gleeful little dance around the bonfire they created from their partially memorized periodic tables, that is not what I’m suggesting at all. So just wipe that manic grin from your faces and put down the matches.
    Remember symbols and metaphors and not taking everything so literally? Well, this is one of those times. The five elements of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit are concepts, categories into which everything can be placed if you look at things symbolically and metaphorically rather than concretely. There are many ways to arrange things. Just as you might arrange the clothes in your closet by color or season, or fat clothes and skinny clothes, all of life can be placed into categories. The periodic table arranges all the elements by their number of protons, their valence electrons, and whether they are metals or non-metals. The children of the earth arrange the elements by their characteristics. Is it rigid and solid? Then it’s earth. Wet and flowing? Then it’s water. Heat or light equal fire, and abstract or etheric things are air. Iron is a form of earth, while helium, being a gas, is a form of air. Who hasn’t seen gold and thought it burned with its own inner fire? And mercury is a form of water; it’s the only element that is liquid at room temperature. The characteristics we use in this categorization can be literal, symbolic, or emotional, so the heat of sudden emotional attraction is just as much fire as a pyre and the chilly wash of humiliation as much water as a winter rainstorm.
    Elements can also be mutable in almost miraculous ways. An explosive metal, sodium, will combine with the poisonous gas chlorine to make the very earthy salt, and two airs in the form of hydrogen and oxygen gas combine to form the very watery . . . well, water. These transformations are almost magical, but people either don’t know about them or don’t think about them, so their composition becomes just mundane background information. Think about the magic in your own body, which is a combination of the earth in your bones; muscle and skin kept alive with the air that flows into and out of your lungs; the chemical reactions that provide the fire to warm your blood; the water of life, which flows like a river throughout your being; and lastly the spirit, that spark of deity providing an indefinable power that gives you consciousness and makes you more than just the sum of your parts. The children of earth both see the elements as part of all nature, where everything is a combination of earth, air, fire, and water, and everything from the stones and the trees to the streams and the bunnies has a bit of the divine flowing through it.
    In ritual, the children of the earth honor the elements as the primal forces of the universe and as the building blocks of life. Each element is oriented toward a compass point. The pairings of element with direction comes from a time so far back that even the vampyres have no record of their origins, but we believe the associations originated very long ago in the area now known as Great Britain. The east side of what is now England has intense winds that blow in off the channel, so the ancients believed the winds were born in the east. To the south, the further one sails the warmer it gets, so the ancients felt the birthplace of fire was to the south. To the west of England there is the vast expanse of water that is the Atlantic Ocean, which until relatively recently humans believed took you to the very edge of the world, so the ancients felt the west was the home of all water. As one moves north onto the mainland the landscape transforms into mountains so foreboding that few would attempt to pass, so the ancients felt this direction was the very origin of earth. Now, saving the best for last, we have spirit, which is born from within and flows out from the center of our being. Therefore, the center of the Circle is reserved for spirit.
    The elements are also represented by the points of the pentagram, which is a five-pointed star. Leonardo da Vinci used the pentagram to represent the head, arms, and legs of his Vitruvian man, and the children of the earth use it to represent the elements—however, while spirit is almost universally associated with the top point, there is a bit of disagreement among the