The Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn’s primary magical practice as taught in our curriculum, The Celtic Golden Dawn, is an elemental one. According to Agrippa the world is threefold. The intellectual world, the celestial world, and the sublunar elemental world containing the elements of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth (Agrippa, Three books of Occult Philosophy, Book I). In the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn we refer to these respectively as the worlds of Ceugant- The Empty Circle corresponding to the Intellectual world, Gwynfydd- Luminous Life, corresponding to the Celestial world including both the astral and etheric realms which we call Aetherial, and finally Abred- Release corresponding to the physical world of the elements (Greer, 2013).
These elements are manifested not as pure forms, but should be thought of manifesting in the physical world as qualities and effects which are aspects of the common substances from with they take their names and like the Chain of Being are ordered from the realm of fire, which is invisible and immediately below the celestial or Aetherial realm, to the realm of air in the atmosphere, to the realm of water, and finally the densest realm of earth. That the earth thrusts itself in some places above the water is proof of the tendency of the elements to depart from their own intrinsic nature (Tillyard E. M., 1959).
Each element has two qualities, the first is its own and the second is a middle in common with the next: Fire being hot and dry, Earth dry and cold, water cold and moist, and air moist and hot (Agrippa). Matter is thought of as being composed of various combinations and permutations of these elements which are at war with each other. Fire is opposed to water but is mitigated by Air (Tillyard), and all the elements are in a constant flux of transmutation one into the other which explains the impermanent and changing state of the world.
In ancient times this elemental view of the makeup of reality was so ubiquitous that the educated part of her audience would easily understand Cleopatra when she said that she was all “Air and Fire”, meaning that she, as was also the properties of air and fire, was to go up. This was opposite to the properties of Earth and Water which are to go down (Tillyard). Elemental thinking also dominated the practice of medicine of the time as each of the four humors were equated with the four elements (Agrippa).
This image of the four elements is what we endeavor to work with and master magically and symbolically in the system of magic we practice in the DOGD through the art of ceremonial, pathworkings, divination, and plant alchemy.