The four elements
Earth, air, fire and water, with spirit often added as a fifth. Wiccans set a tool on the altar for each, and write the elements as triangles: fire pointing up, water pointing down, and air and earth the same, each crossed by a bar.
Meaning
The four elements of Wicca are named after Aristotle: the Covenant of the Goddess calls them “the ‘Aristotelian’ Elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”, and adds that “some ‘maps’ include Spirit”. Each has a tool on the altar and a set of qualities. Earth is the pentacle or a dish of salt or soil, for stability, material wealth, the body and practical affairs. Air is a censer or a bell, for communication, vitality, intellect and understanding. Fire is a candle, for will, transmutation, life-force and power, and Water a chalice, for cleansing, regeneration and emotion. Where Spirit is included, an ankh or a quartz crystal stands for it. The Covenant is careful about the status of the scheme: the tools form a symbolic “map” agreed by the people using it, “arbitrary and not ‘true’ in an absolute sense”. The elements are used today by Wiccans and other modern Pagans and in ceremonial magic.
Origin and history
Wicca took its elemental tools from ceremonial magic. The Golden Dawn, a magical order, gave each element a ritual weapon, and a set in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic has all four: a chalice for Water, a wand for Fire, a dagger for Air and a painted pentacle for Earth, the last inscribed in Hebrew with words for Earth and North and the names Uriel and Adonai. The Covenant of the Goddess names the Golden Dawn among the sources of the Craft’s revival, and the Wiccan altar keeps the chalice, wand, blade and pentacle, with the censer beside them.
The triangles come from alchemy. Unicode encodes them as alchemical symbols, matching the alchemical symbol for fire to the up-pointing triangle and the one for water to the down-pointing triangle; the barred forms are air and earth. An Alpha and Omega pentacle in the same museum, which shows the Golden Dawn’s elemental weapons, sets the four triangles round a pentacle whose points stand for “fire, water, air, earth and spirit”.
The triangles
Fire’s triangle points up and water’s points down. Air is fire’s triangle with a bar across it, and earth is water’s with a bar across it. The museum’s description of its Alpha and Omega pentacle pairs them the same way: two triangles “both with an internal line, one inverted, which represent earth and air”, and two plain ones that represent fire and water. Unicode also encodes a symbol for quintessence, the fifth element of the alchemists.
Is the athame air or fire?
It depends on the tradition. The Covenant of the Goddess defines the athame, the witch’s ritual knife, as “associated with the Element of Air or Fire, depending upon tradition”, and says that many “maps” disagree on which element the sword or wand belongs to. In the Golden Dawn set the dagger is Air and the wand is Fire.
Spirit, the fifth
Traditions that add Spirit put it at the top of the pentacle, whose five points stand for the four elements and spirit, as the museum records for the Alpha and Omega pentacle. The Covenant of the Goddess lists perfection, summation, balance, illumination and eternity as Spirit’s properties.
In other traditions
Hindu tantric yoga has five elements, not four, and places them in the body. Christopher Wallis, a scholar of Sanskrit, explains that in most chakra practices the seed-mantra LAM, for Earth, is installed in the lowest centre and VAM, for Water, in the next, with RAM for Fire, YAM for Wind and HAM for Space (see Chakras).
Read next
- Next in Pagan and Wiccan symbolsHorned godThe god of Wicca, honoured beside the Goddess: “the Horned God of the sun and animal life”, in the Covenant of the Goddess’s words. Wiccans write his sign as a circle with a crescent resting on it, horns up.
- Another tradition's set of elementsFive elements (wu xing)Wood, fire, earth, metal and water: the five phases (五行 wǔxíng) of Chinese thought, which describe how things change rather than what they are made of. In the Chinese calendar each year takes the element of its heavenly stem, and the element follows the year’s last digit: years ending in 6 and 7, such as 2026 and 2027, are Fire years.
See also
Wiccan pentacle, Chakras, Tria prima: sulphur, mercury and salt, Triple moon (triple goddess), Wheel of the Year.
Sources
- General Practices, Covenant of the Goddess, The Tools of a Witch
- Definitions, Covenant of the Goddess, Athamé
- 1993 – Pentacle for Earth, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- 3931 – Alpha and Omega Pentacle, collection record, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 1F700–1F704
- The real story on the Chakras, Christopher Wallis (Hareesh), 5 February 2016, revised, Hareesh.org
- Wicca, Ethan Doyle White, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Beliefs and practices
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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