The four elements are so deeply ingrained in Western magical practice that they feel like fixed, inherited furniture. They appear in the Golden Dawn’s elemental weapons, Wiccan quarter calls, and correspondence tables. Less obvious are their origins, and how strange and alive the original framework was.
Empedocles of Acragas (c. 494–434 BCE) was a Sicilian philosopher, poet, and wonder-worker. He is the figure most responsible for establishing the four elements as the foundational framework of Western thought, though he never called them elements; he called them roots. And alongside them, he placed two cosmic forces that he considered equally real, equally fundamental, and equally necessary: Love and Strife.
Empedocles’ ideas survive in fragments of a longer poem, so we work with pieces rather than the whole. What endures is vivid, specific, and enough to build usefully with.
I wrote about Pythagoras and what his philosophy offers modern magical practitioners. Empedocles, born a generation later, is the next figure in the same lineage, and a striking contrast. Where Pythagoras sought harmony through proportion and mathematical attunement, Empedocles does not offer a philosophy of serene order. It is a philosophy of force, of drama, of the eternal push and pull that keeps the universe from collapsing into either chaos or stasis. For practitioners who want a framework that matches the texture of magical experience — the working that coheres beautifully and the one that flies apart, the season of deep connection and the season of necessary endings — Empedocles is worth exploring.
The four roots
Empedocles never used the word ‘element.’ He called them rhizomata: roots. The four roots are fire, air, water, and earth. He identified each with a deity: Zeus for fire, Hera for earth, Aidoneus for air, and Nestis for water. These are fundamental realities, not symbols or metaphors. They are indestructible themselves yet infinitely various in combination.
The roots are the substance of all becoming. Every manifest thing — a stone, a storm, a human body, a song — is a particular blending of these four in certain proportions. Creation is their mixing; dissolution is their separation. As Empedocles writes:
For these things are all equal and of like age in their birth,
but each rules over a different prerogative and each has its own character,
and they dominate in turn as time circles around.
And in addition to them nothing comes into being nor ceases [to be];
for if they constantly perished, they would no longer be.
And what could increase this totality, and whence would it come?
And how would it also be destroyed, since nothing is bereft of them?
But these very things are and running through each other
they become different at different times and are always, perpetually alike.
Nothing is ever truly made or destroyed, only rearranged.
Elemental frameworks in Western magic—the quarters, weapons, and directions—all descend from Empedocles’ vision, where the dance of Love and Strife shaped the roots’ combinations. Approaching Empedocles directly connects us to the origins of these traditions, weaving his essential duality back into modern practice and restoring the vitality of his framework.
Love and Strife: the cosmic forces
At the heart of Empedocles’ cosmos are two forces governing all movement and change. Love (Philotes) draws the roots together into unity, form, and complexity. Strife (Neikos) separates them into multiplicity and individual existence. Rather than allowing either force to dominate entirely, Empedocles describes a cyclical universe in which Love and Strife alternate in dominance, each rising and falling in turn. This dynamic contrast underpins all movement and change. In his own words:
And these things never cease from constantly alternating,
at one time all coming together by love into one,
and at another time again all being borne apart separately by the hostility of strife.
Traditions shaped by Christianity cast love as redemptive and conflict as something to overcome. Empedocles rejects this. Strife is not evil; it differentiates, allowing individuals to exist. Without Strife, everything collapses into undifferentiated unity. Love without Strife is not paradise, but formlessness. Still, Empedocles calls Strife ‘destructive’ and its action ‘hostility.’ He is not fully neutral, even while insisting Strife is cosmically necessary. That tension is honest and worth reflecting on rather than trying to resolve too quickly.
In practice, this suggests reading any situation in terms of which force is dominant. Does something need to be drawn together, unified, or healed? That is Love’s work. Does something need to be separated, clarified, or ended? That is Strife’s. Neither force is inherently correct. They are only more or less appropriate to the situation at hand.
Love and Strife also offer something that much of Western esotericism doesn’t: a foundational polarity that is not grounded in gender. The dominant framework in Western magical traditions organises duality around masculine and feminine, god and goddess, active and receptive. That framework carries power for many practitioners, but it also carries historical baggage, often mapping traits uncomfortably onto bodies and identities. Love and Strife are not gendered in any essential way. They are cosmic forces moving through all things regardless of sex, gender, or form. Love is not inherently soft, nor Strife inherently hard — Love can be fierce; Strife can be clarifying and clean. This is a genuinely dualistic framework that does not require anyone to locate themselves within a gender binary in order to engage with it.
Aphrodite and Philotes
Empedocles identifies his cosmic Love directly with Aphrodite. He writes:
For she is deemed even by mortals to be inborn in [their] bodies
and by her they think loving thoughts and accomplish works of unity
calling her by the names Joy and Aphrodite
Aphrodite is not an external force to be invoked from outside. She is already inside. She is inherent in embodied existence itself.
In the fragments, Aphrodite’s work is physical and skilled. She is not a soft goddess of feeling, but a maker. She fashions ‘tireless eyes,’ blends elements into form, and employs what Empedocles calls ‘the devices of Kupris’—a cult name for Aphrodite. This phrase recurs, evoking action, technical skill, and craftsmanship. When earth is moistened by rain and given to fire to gain form, that is her work. The intelligence behind physical creation is hers.
An Empedoclean approach to Aphrodite means noticing not just personal desire, but all places Love works: a flower opening, a conversation deepening, energy coalescing in ritual. See her as a creative force shaping matter.
A useful practice is to notice one act of Philotes daily, something drawn together, something made unified. Name it as Love at work. This attunes you to the force over time, shifting how you perceive situations in ritual and life.
The soul as wanderer
Empedocles’ understanding of the soul is darker and stranger than the Pythagorean model. The Pythagorean tradition frames the soul’s journey as slow purification leading to cosmic harmony. For Empedocles, the soul is in exile. We are fallen spirits, cast from a state of primordial unity, where Love held sway, into fragmented embodied existence. We have been plant, animal, and human. We will be again.
The path home is right living, purification, and recognising kinship with all beings. Empedocles’ ethics are urgent, not abstract.
There is a contradiction worth naming. If Strife is necessary, even productive, why does Empedocles call embodied life exile and the soul’s primordial home a realm of Love alone?
Empedocles holds both ideas—Strife’s necessity and the soul’s longing for unity—without fully resolving the tension. In the manifest world, Strife is not a problem to solve but the condition of existence. It keeps things distinct, allowing a tree to be a tree, not a stone. The soul follows a longer arc: across many lifetimes, it returns to unity, which Strife cannot give. The practitioner working with Empedocles does not aim to eliminate Strife from daily life or practice. They work slowly, over more time than one incarnation grants, toward what lies beyond Strife. This perspective does not make Strife bad; it makes conflict, differentiation, and individuality part of the journey, not a mistake.
All things are kin
Because everything is woven from four roots, and because Love and Strife move through all beings equally, Empedocles teaches a radical ethics of kinship. Trees, animals, and humans share the same substance. Harming another being fragments both and works against the slow return of Love.
Like Pythagoras, Empedocles was a vegetarian. Animals and humans share the same spirit, he argued; any animal could house a reincarnated soul. Eating meat, for him, was not dietary but a moral failing, akin to murdering kin. He was not subtle about it.
Will you not desist from harsh-sounding bloodshed? Do you not see that you are devouring each other in the heedlessness of your understanding?
A father lifts up his dear son, who has changed his form,
and prays and slaughters him, in great folly, and they are at a loss
as they sacrifice the suppliant. But he, on the other hand, deaf to the rebukes,
sacrificed him in his halls, and prepared himself an evil meal.
In the same way, a son seizes his father and the children their mother,
and tearing out their life-breath devour their own dear flesh.
The logic is unsparing. If the soul transmigrates through all living forms, then the animal on the altar may be your father, your child, your kin in a former life. The failure is not cruelty but recognition, or rather, the catastrophic absence of it.
This is not guilt-based ethics but a cosmological one. Cruelty and extraction participate in Strife beyond its proper season. Compassion and recognition participate in Love’s work of drawing the scattered cosmos back toward wholeness. Magic that serves only the self, without regard for the web of beings around it, is, in Empedocles’ terms, not really magic at all. It is a kind of theft that the cosmos will account for across lifetimes.
Working with the Empedoclean current
Track Love and Strife through the turning year
Depending on where you are in the world, half of the year may feel Philotes-dominant: things growing together, energies merging, boundaries softening. The other half may tend toward Neikos: separation, individuation, clarity, endings. The Wheel of the Year, observed through this lens, becomes less a sequence of festivals and more a map of force, a way of tracking which cosmic current is strongest and working with it accordingly.
This is particularly useful for practitioners in the Southern Hemisphere, for whom the inherited Wheel sits awkwardly. The dates aren’t the problem; the winter solstice happens when it happens. What doesn’t translate is the environmental imagery that gives those festivals their emotional logic.
The Wheel was built from a Northern European experience of the seasons, where winter is bare, dark, and apparently dead, and the return of green in spring is a genuine relief. Where I live in Australia, summer is dry, and we have bushfires. In autumn, the trees with leaves that turn and drop are European species; most natives are evergreen. Winter is generally rainier and wetter, and the land is green and lush.
The most common workaround is to treat the festivals as psychological rather than environmental events, and to harvest what you metaphorically reap rather than what is literally growing. That is one approach, and I’ve written about my reservations with it. Love and Strife offers a framework rooted not in a specific cultural landscape but in what the forces are actually doing in the land around you, wherever you are.
Notice the forces in yourself
In any given season of inner life, one force tends to be stronger. When Love is ascendant, edges soften, and there is a pull toward connection, intimacy, healing, and merging. When Strife is ascendant, clarity sharpens, there is energy for action, assertion, and necessary endings. The practice is not to always move toward Love, but to recognise which force is actually present and to work with it rather than against it. For a practitioner engaged in longer-term soul work, this daily attunement is also part of the larger arc: learning, over time and across many cycles, what it means to move consciously between the two.
Work with the roots through breath and attention
Before ritual, spend time with each element in turn: the fire of aliveness, the air in motion, the water running through the body, the earth underfoot. Notice which roots feel strong and which feel thin. This is diagnostic. It locates the balance and suggests what a working needs.
Where this leads
Empedocles’ four roots flow directly into Platonic cosmology, medieval elemental philosophy, and Hermetic tradition. Every time you call a quarter, every time you identify something as “a fire situation” or “a water working,” you are drawing on a lineage that runs back to a Sicilian philosopher-mystic who taught that love and conflict are the twin engines of the universe.
Empedocles’ voice lingers long after you’ve set him down. What stays is the insistence that Love and Strife are both necessary, that neither is to be transcended or resolved away, and that the world is better understood as force than as fixed form. That feels, to me, like a genuinely pagan way of seeing.