The ancients believed the World to be composed of 4 basic elements – Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. These were considered the critical energy forces that sustained life. All of these elements are integral parts of matter or the physical universe, and the human body is a physical creation existing in the material realm. Therefore, the human beings were seen to be made of and governed by the four elements. Maintaining a balance between these elements was advocated to ensure physical as well as psychological well-being.
Everything in the physical World was observed to have a combination of four principal qualities – hot, cold, dry and moist. A combination of hot and dry produced Fire, hot and wet resulted in Air, cold and dry gave Earth, and cold and wet combined to produce Water. Furthermore, these four elements combined to create life, but only together with the quintessential fifth element, the life force, the ‘spirit’.
The Earth element has cleaning power. It symbolizes prosperity, fertility, stability, orderliness, groundedness, sustenance, creativity, physical abundance, nourishment, solidity, dependability, security, permanence, intuition, introspection, and wisdom. The season related to Earth is Winter and the associated direction is North. The element is symbolically represented by an inverted triangle with a horizontal line running through it.