The Element Earth
What comes to mind when you think about the element Earth?
The first thing I think of is soil, the brown stuff I plant things into in my garden. The soil contains and stores all the minerals and moisture plants need to live. Earth is everything we are, and everything we have comes from this element. We come from it, and at the end of our lives we return to it.
No wonder the Earth element is associated with abundance and prosperity. Earth is where things grow and have their foundation. This is where the association with abundance and prosperity comes from.
Earth is also rock and stones, it makes up the foundation of our planet. It stabilities and grounds us. One of my favourite grounding exercises is to visualize myself as a tree. My roots growing down into the soft, brown soil. Wriggling my roots into it, down to the core of the very planet itself.
Earth is associated with North, with the season of winter and the advancement of old age. Winter, to me at least, is a time of reflecting. The trees and plants and even the animals have all withdrawn into Mother Earth to recuperate, to replenish, ready to venture forth in the spring, renewed and refreshed.
Don’t forget to look after this element, the planet, the environment around you. It can even be something small like picking up a piece of litter.
Earth has the colours of the season of winter; those of the dark nights, brown soil, dark grassy landscape and the white of frost and snow. It is also the time of the Cailleach; she is the Goddess of Winter.
To represent this element you could use a small dish of soil, an earthenware dish, a stone, a pebble, a crystal or even a piece of wood.
Direction: North
Nature: Fertile, nurturing, stabilizing, grounding
Elemental: Gnome
Colours: Green, brown, black, grey, white
Places: Caves, forests, groves, valleys, fields, farms, gardens, parks, kitchens, basements, mines, holes
Magic: Money, prosperity, fertility, stability, grounding, employment, material matters
Herbs/ plants: Patchouli, vertivert, moss, nuts, roots, barley, cotton, cypress, fern, honeysuckle, horehound, knotweed, mugwort, oats, potato, primrose, rhubarb, rye, sorrel, tulip, turnip, wheat
Stones: Emerald, peridot, agate, apache tear, aventurine, orange calcite, carnelian, diamond, fluorite, jade, jasper, jet, malachite, petrified wood, ruby, sugilite, tiger eye, black or green tourmaline, unakite
Metals: Iron, lead Animals: Dog, horse, earthworm, gopher, ant, cow, burrowing animals, wolf, bear
Season: Winter Time: Night
Tool: Pentacle
Signs: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn
Sense: Touch
Symbols: Salt, clay, soil, rocks, wheat, acorns
Magick type: Gardening, magnet, image, stone, tree, know, binding.
Source
Pagan Portals – Kitchen Witchcraft: Crafts of a Kitchen Witch
Rachel Patterson
Witches Of The Craft® 