![]() ![]() They further suggest that all of creation, including the human body, is made up of these five essential elements and that upon death, the human body dissolves into these five elements of nature, thereby balancing the cycle of nature. The system of five elements are found in Vedas, especially Ayurveda, the pancha mahabhuta, or "five great elements", of Hinduism are bhūmi ( earth), ap or jala ( water), tejas or agni ( fire), marut, vayu or pavan ( air or wind) and vyom or shunya (space or zero) or akash ( aether or void). In other Babylonian texts these phenomena are considered independent of their association with deities, though they are not treated as the component elements of the universe, as later in Empedocles. In Babylonian mythology, the cosmogony called Enûma Eliš, a text written between the 18th and 16th centuries BC, involves four gods that we might see as personified cosmic elements: sea, earth, sky, wind. In Buddhism the four great elements, to which two others are sometimes added, are not viewed as substances, but as categories of sensory experience. Similar lists existed in ancient China, Korea and Japan. In Hinduism, particularly in an esoteric context, the four states-of-matter describe matter, and a fifth element describes that which was beyond the material world. The concept of the five elements formed a basis of analysis in both Hinduism and Buddhism. In classical thought, the four elements earth, water, air, and fire as proposed by Empedocles frequently occur Aristotle added a fifth element, aether it has been called akasha in India and quintessence in Europe. The most commonly observed states of solid, liquid, gas, and plasma share many attributes with the classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire, respectively, but these states are due to similar behavior of different types of atoms at similar energy levels, and not due to containing a certain type of atom or a certain type of substance. ![]() These elements form chemical compounds and mixtures, and under different temperatures and pressures, these substances can adopt different states of matter. Atomic theory classifies atoms into more than a hundred chemical elements such as oxygen, iron, and mercury. Modern science does not support the classical elements as the material basis of the physical world. In Europe, the Ancient Greek system of Aristotle evolved slightly into the medieval system, which for the first time in Europe became subject to experimental verification in the 1600s, during the Scientific Revolution. While the classification of the material world in ancient Indian, Hellenistic Egypt, and ancient Greece into Air, Earth, Fire and Water was more philosophical, during the Islamic Golden Age medieval middle eastern scientists used practical, experimental observation to classify materials. Some of these interpretations included atomism (the idea of very small, indivisible portions of matter) but other interpretations considered the elements to be divisible into infinitely small pieces without changing their nature. Sometimes these theories overlapped with mythology and were personified in deities. These different cultures and even individual philosophers had widely varying explanations concerning their attributes and how they related to observable phenomena as well as cosmology. The Chinese Wu Xing system lists Wood ( 木 mù), Fire ( 火 huǒ), Earth ( 土 tǔ), Metal ( 金 jīn), and Water ( 水 shuǐ), though these are described more as energies or transitions rather than as types of material. Ancient cultures in Greece, Babylonia, Japan, Tibet, and India had similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to "air" as "wind" and the fifth element as "void". Segment of the macrocosm showing the elemental spheres of terra (earth), aqua (water), aer (air), and ignis (fire), Robert Fludd, 1617Ĭlassical elements typically refer to the concepts, rejected by modern science, in ancient Greece of earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. For the album by Chronic Future, see 4 Elements (album). ![]()
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