Page - 176 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

176 | Michael R. Heim www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 159–181 well-spring to mortals.” Air, earth, fire, and water appear as powerful divinities, not as chemical compounds. As William Guthrie wrote in his history of Greek philosophy: empedocles combined his search for the ultimate nature of things with the demands of a deeply religious outlook, to which the nature and destiny of the human soul was of fundamental interest. he saw the answer to Parmenides in the substitution of four ultimate root-substances or elements (earth, water, air and fire) for the single principle of the Milesians.27 empedocles’s roots create web-like mixtures, blending what Aristotle would later describe as wet and dry, cold and hot qualities. empedocles’s interest in the four root qualities was for healing and balancing purposes. Undistracted by the ten thousand things of daily life, empedocles’s meditations cultivated an awareness of the basics that remain with a person throughout a lifetime.28 empedocles was an exponent of harmonizing elements that are animated by love and strife, attraction and repulsion. the two mixing principles that govern the four roots, love and strife, operate in cycles. With love ascendant, the roots form organic wholes or “spheres”. in time, strife comes into play and pulls the harmony apart, so that the distinct separateness of things produces gaps in separate components. Contrary to the nineteenth-century picture of a proto-scientist, his ancient bi- ographers describe empedocles a spiritual healer, exactly as he described him- self. Empedocles describes people flocking to him, looking for healing. In the fifth century BCE, medicine was part of philosophy. And it was precisely through ancient medicine that empedocles’s legacy was preserved after philosophy split into the intellectualism of Plato and the scientific pursuits of Aristotle. The four humors of the human body and the four temperaments dominated medical practice throughout the medieval period. During this period, Arab alchemists preserved the ancient writings and their systems of mineral and astrological correspondences became part of the transmission of antiquity that the Medici family imported during the early renaissance. the Medici’s translator of ancient writings was wizard and sorcerer Marsilio ficino (1433–1499), who founded the florentine Academy. ficino’s humanistic writings were later eclipsed by scientif- ic empiricism, but his ideas smoldered secretly through the centuries, occasion- ally drawing the attention of esoteric and hermetic researchers. secret socie- ties, rosicrucians, and alchemists continued using the four roots, and in Britain in the late 1800s, the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn coded the elements into a unitary system of correspondences that culminated in the divination sys- 27 Guthrie 1962, 5. 28 fragment 16 / 110, inwood, 219.