Alchemical Earth

The Fixed Residue

Water's downward triangle crossed by a horizontal bar: earth, the cold and dry element.

Earth is cold and dry, and its sign is the descending triangle crossed by a horizontal bar — water's figure with the bar that distinguishes the two heavy elements from one another, exactly as air is distinguished from fire above. Aristotle placed earth lowest of the four, settling at the centre of the world, and alchemy read it as the fixed residue: the part of a substance that fire cannot drive off, what remains in the vessel when everything volatile has gone. The four signs together form one figure used four ways, which is why they are drawn from a single construction here rather than as four separate marks. In the tarot the element governs the suit of Pentacles, an assignment made by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1880s.