The five elements as a four-plus-one system
Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Spirit are presented as a unified system, but it's worth being precise about the internal shape of that system: four elements sit on the same structural level, each governing a specific quadrant of experience, while Spirit sits above or through them as a fifth, integrating term. This "four-plus-one" shape recurs constantly throughout the rest of the outline — it's the same shape as the four cardinal directions plus center, the four Lesser Sabbats plus the cross-quarter Greater ones, and the four-phase Cardinality cycle, all organized around some kind of unifying fifth or central point.
Each of the four base elements corresponds simultaneously to a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level — meaning the system isn't claiming that, say, Water is only an emotional category and Air is only a mental one. Rather, each element is understood to have a distinct expression at every one of those four levels at once: Water has a physical form (literal water, the tides, bodily fluids), a mental expression (intuitive, non-linear thought), an emotional expression (deep feeling, empathy), and a spiritual expression (psychic receptivity, the unconscious). This is part of why the elemental correspondence tables later in this section can list such a wide range of associated items — physical animals, mental "mantras," and spiritual chakra placements — under a single element without that variety being a contradiction; it's the same underlying element showing up at four different registers simultaneously.
Air
Direction: East. Color(s): yellow, with sky-blue and pastels as secondary options. Polarity: masculine/projective — meaning Air's energy is understood to move outward, to assert and communicate, rather than to receive. Mantra: "To Know." Archangel: Raphael. Elemental being: Sylphs. Animals: birds, butterflies, bats, dragonflies — broadly, anything whose defining feature is flight or aerial movement. Tarot suit: Swords. Chakra: Heart (with the caveat above about internal inconsistency). Season: Spring. Zodiac signs: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius — notably, the three "Air signs" of the standard tropical zodiac, which ties this elemental table directly back to the zodiac-element pairing system.
Fire
Direction: South. Color(s): red, orange, gold — the "warm" end of the color spectrum. Polarity: masculine/projective, the same polarity classification as Air, which is worth noting since it means the masculine/feminine elemental split isn't simply "two masculine, two feminine" in a tidy alternating pattern around the compass, but specifically groups Air-and-Fire together as projective against Water-and-Earth together as receptive. Mantra: "To Will" — directly recalling the Crowley-derived "magic is causing change in conformity with will" definition; Fire is, in effect, the elemental correspondence for the will itself. Archangel: Michael. Elemental being: Salamanders. Animals: lions, tigers, salamanders, and the mythic dragon/phoenix pairing — animals associated with ferocity, heat, or (in the mythic cases) literal rebirth-through-fire. Tarot suit: Wands. Chakra: Solar Plexus — the seat, in most chakra systems, of personal willpower and ego-strength, which lines up cleanly with Fire's "To Will" mantra. Season: Summer. Zodiac signs: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius, the three tropical Fire signs.
Water
Direction: West. Color(s): blue, indigo, aqua, silver, purple — a notably wider color range than Fire or Earth get, possibly reflecting Water's own correspondence to emotional and psychic complexity/variability. Polarity: feminine/receptive. Mantra: "To Dare" — an interesting choice at first glance, since Water is elsewhere associated with gentleness and receptivity rather than boldness, but it connects to Water's psychic/intuitive domain: daring, here, likely refers to the courage required to trust intuition and emotional truth rather than to physical audacity (which is Fire's territory). Archangel: Gabriel. Elemental being: Undines/Ondines. Animals: dolphins, otters, fish, and aquatic creatures generally. Tarot suit: Cups. Chakra: Heart (again, subject to the internal-inconsistency caveat noted above). Season: Fall. Zodiac signs: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces, the three tropical Water signs.
Earth
Direction: North. Color(s): green, brown, black — the "grounded," soil-and-forest end of the spectrum. Polarity: feminine/receptive, grouped with Water as the two receptive elements against Air and Fire's projective pairing. Mantra: "To Be Silent" — the most distinctive and, on first encounter, most counterintuitive of the four mantras, since it doesn't obviously map onto a familiar personality trait the way "To Know," "To Will," or "To Dare" do; it likely reflects Earth's association with patience, stability, and the kind of quiet, unhurried endurance associated with stone, root systems, and long geological time, as opposed to the more active or emotionally expressive qualities of the other three elements. Archangel: Uriel. Elemental being: Gnomes. Animals: bears, coyotes, deer, and broadly nocturnal/four-legged animals. Tarot suit: Pentacles. Chakra: Root — the lowest, most physically-grounded chakra, a clean and internally consistent match (unlike the Heart-chakra ambiguity affecting Air and Water). Season: Winter. Zodiac signs: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn, the three tropical Earth signs.
Spirit
Spirit occupies a structurally different position from the other four, which the table itself signals by leaving several columns blank rather than forcing an answer. Direction: Center — not a cardinal point at all, but the integrating point all four cardinal elements surround. Color(s): white, black, purple. Polarity: none assigned — Spirit is explicitly exempted from the masculine/feminine polarity split that organizes the other four, consistent with its role as the unifying fifth term rather than a fifth peer element. No mantra and no archangel are given in this composite table (though Metatron, associated with Spirit here, is traditionally regarded in Judeo-Christian angelology as uniquely close to or even originally human, which fits Spirit's role as the element that bridges the human and the divine). Elemental being: none specified. Animals: snakes and spiders — an interesting pairing, since both are commonly associated in folklore with transformation, hidden knowledge, or liminal/threshold states, consistent with Spirit's own liminal, boundary-crossing role. Tarot suit: Major Arcana — rather than one of the four Minor Arcana suits assigned to the other elements, Spirit corresponds to the entire set of 22 archetypal cards that sit outside and above the four suits, again reflecting its integrating rather than parallel role. Chakra: Crown, the topmost chakra, associated with connection to the divine — a clean structural echo of Earth's Root-chakra placement at the opposite end of the same energetic column. Season: none given (Spirit isn't seasonal). Zodiac signs: none given. Instead of a season, Spirit's "timing" is given as before birth/after death — placing it outside the cyclical, repeating time of the seasonal year entirely, and into the same territory as the Spirit Active/Spirit Passive, Life/Death material.