The four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, constitute the fundamental classification of matter inherited from Aristotelian natural philosophy and adopted by the entire Western alchemical tradition. Empedocles first proposed the fourfold scheme in the fifth century BCE, and Aristotle refined it by assigning paired qualities to each element: earth is cold and dry, water is cold and moist, air is hot and moist, and fire is hot and dry. Because adjacent elements share one quality (earth and water share coldness, water and air share moisture, air and fire share heat, fire and earth share dryness), transmutation between adjacent elements is possible by altering the shared quality. This doctrine provided the theoretical foundation for alchemical transmutation: if elements can be transformed into one another by changing their qualities, then metals, which are composed of elements, can be transformed as well.

In alchemical practice, the four elements are understood not as simple substances but as principles of action. Earth represents fixity, solidity, and resistance to change. Water represents fluidity, dissolution, and the menstruum that dissolves fixed bodies. Air represents volatility, the tendency to rise and escape. Fire represents the transformative agent that drives all change. The Great Work requires mastering the interplay of all four: dissolving fixed earth in water, volatilizing the solution into air, and applying fire to drive the cycle of transformation. The philosopher's stone, in many formulations, is precisely the substance in which all four elements have been brought into perfect, stable equilibrium.

Maier devotes several emblems of the Atalanta Fugiens to the four elements and their relationships. Emblem XIX, with the motto 'If you kill one of the four, everybody will be dead immediately,' dramatizes the interdependence of the four elements. De Jong reads this emblem as expressing the doctrine that the four elements are so tightly bound in the alchemical work that the destruction of any one destabilizes all the others. In Emblem XXI, the geometric formula of circle, square, triangle, and circle encodes the reconciliation of the four elements (represented by the square's four sides) into the unity of the stone (represented by the final circle). De Jong traces this formula to the Pseudo-Aristotelian tradition and demonstrates that the square signifies the four elements, the triangle the three principles (or the Trinity), and the circles the unity from which the work begins and to which it returns.

De Jong's commentary on Emblem VIII explains that the philosophical egg contains all four elements in unified form: its hard shell is earth, its albumen is water, its membrane is air, and its yolk is fire, with the solar point in the middle representing the red tincture. This micro-cosmological reading of the egg as a vessel containing the four elements in embryonic form connects the practical imagery of the laboratory to the Aristotelian framework of natural philosophy. The four elements are not merely abstract categories but the living forces present in the matter under transformation.

The discourse of Emblem XVII, on the four fires, presents a parallel fourfold classification of heat that maps onto the four elements: elementary fire (ordinary flame), the fire contrary to nature (the corrosive dragon, watery in character), the unnatural fire (the gentle warmth of baths and ashes, airy in quality), and the natural fire (the inherent warmth of all things, earthy in its fixity). De Jong demonstrates that Maier's four fires are the four elements in their active, transformative aspect, confirming that the elemental framework pervades every level of the work.

For the lay reader, the four elements are the basic vocabulary of the natural world as understood by Maier and his contemporaries. They are not the chemical elements of the modern periodic table but principles of quality and activity: hot and cold, moist and dry, volatile and fixed. The Atalanta Fugiens assumes this framework throughout, and the recurring imagery of dissolution (water), evaporation (air), burning (fire), and precipitation (earth) traces the matter's passage through all four elemental states on its journey toward the perfection of the stone.

Meanings Across Registers

De Jong shows that alchemical terms operate simultaneously across material, medical, spiritual, and cosmological dimensions.

Alchemical

Earth, water, air, and fire: the qualitative substrates whose proportions and transmutations underlie every alchemical operation, as Maier's emblems repeatedly stage their interplay.

Medical

The Galenic basis of humoral physiology: blood (air), phlegm (water), yellow bile (fire), and black bile (earth)—health as their balanced commixture, disease as their disorder.

Spiritual

The fourfold structure of the soul or psyche; the elemental temperaments through which spiritual aspiration must be tempered into a balanced and integrated character.

Cosmological

The sublunary cosmos's material constituents arranged in concentric spheres beneath the heavens; the framework through which celestial influences act upon terrestrial bodies.