You may find playing with such lists as these helpful for your learning to perceive the elements. If so, go for it. But for some, it can be a bit boring. And one thing, in my experience, that elemental perception is not, is boring. So I, in part, made this deck as a tool for learning to perceive the elements at play in your world, inside and out.
Of course, I didn’t make the deck one-dimensional like the lists above. I made it playful. Rather than focus on each element in isolation, the elemental teachings in the deck are each about relationships between two elements. This deck asks you to entertain ideas and take them with you to see where and how you find them for yourself. While I believe in clear and direct teachings in many regards, in the realm of the enigmas of inter-dimensional consciousness, to teach in riddles is the only way to elicit self-understanding.
As they say in our ancient future: if you take someone to another dimension, they will have a fun day. If you teach them to see the ways between worlds for themselves, they will have a lifetime of adventures.
What About Spirit, Celestial & Dimensional?
In this deck, the Aether element is called Spirit. This is partly due to its association with the 5th psychic center of the throat. Spirit is the 5th element, and in its realized form contains the highest traits of the terrestrial four (earth, water, fire and air). One version of this might go like the following: from the earth it gets its unyieldingness, from the water its adaptability, from the fire its transmutational capacity and from the air its penetrating persistence. Like Spirit, a powerful voice resounds and expresses these traits to shape the world around it.
As the deck took shape, the elements of celestial and dimensional emerged to facilitate the integration of elemental relationships and the psychic centers of the human body. These additional two elements are not meant to be strictly distinct elements from Spirit, per se, but rather subtler and deeper permutations of it. Much more can be said on this topic and is addressed in depth in my course on the psychic centers. Suffice it to say, they represent far more transpersonal aspects of reality than the first four elements. When realized, they open the paths of higher consciousness and a more enriching and down-to-earth life.
Declaration Of The Four Sacred Things
The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
To this, we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this, we dedicate our lives.
—Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing