Alchemical Water
The Descending Triangle
Points down because water settles: the solvent that must undo what has set before anything new is made.
Water is the cold and moist element of the Aristotelian four, and its sign is fire's triangle reflected — standing on its point rather than its base, because water moves downward and settles. The two signs are the same figure and the reflection is the whole of the difference between them. Alchemy gave water solutio, the dissolving that must undo a substance before anything can be composed from it again, and the descending triangle was read as the vessel that receives. Earth carries the same downward triangle with a bar across it: within each pair of elements the bar is what separates the two, and no further meaning is attached to it. In the tarot the element governs the suit of Cups, an assignment made by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1880s rather than one inherited from the alchemists.
Light
Feeling, intuition and adaptability. The dissolving power that softens what has set too hard, and the receptivity that lets one thing become another.
Shadow
Formlessness and drift: emotion without banks to run between, or a dissolution that goes on past the point where anything is left to rebuild.
