How to Incorporate Elements
in Your Circle of Eight
Elements are central to some groups; in others, they have less significance. This may be influenced by where you meet, the magical backgrounds of your participants, and the type of work you plan to do in your Circle of Eight. When people are new to magic and ritual, the elements can offer immediate, tangible relationship to different aspects of magic and ways of understanding energies. A circle that meets in a high-rise building may have very different relationships with the elements than one that meets in someone’s backyard or another that meets in a country dwelling. The importance and relative strength of different elements will vary, depending upon your landscape.
You may choose to combine the elemental work with casting a geographic circle, heading out into the directions and seeing what you find or searching on a map for obvious land features and elemental influences. You could import the elements into the directions, then seek out locations that support these associations, or you could work the other way, beginning with what you find and building up your elemental associations from that. You may choose to have several variants of each element—salt water and fresh water, for example—to cover all eight positions, or you may choose to stick with four elements in four directions, allowing them to spill into the cross-quarters on either side.
What follows is a set of suggestions. You may already be used to calling to certain elements in particular directions and not wish to change at this stage. I certainly know of groups of people who have quite differing views of which elements should be called in which directions. Some settle on a particular pattern, agreed upon simply for the purposes of that group but not expected to be kept in personal or other magical workings; some call the elements into different directions each time, depending on what the ritual is or who’s in charge of that working.
For a Circle of Eight, it works well to have the elements in directions that make sense to the group and the location. The Circle of Eight is local magic, so what your Circle of Eight will have in common with all other Circles of Eight—or Pagan and many other types of magical circle—will be that they acknowledge the elements. What might be different in your circle is the places in which you acknowledge the elements and the variations on the elements you may be working with. This is already different between hemispheres and I think can be different from locality to locality with no loss of power or overall magical impact. We are all revering life and the elements that compose everything we know; that they occur slightly differently—in different forms and directions and intensities—from place to place should be no surprise to us. Certainly it is no surprise to our planet, which encompasses winter and summer simultaneously and a wealth of seas, jungles, deserts, forests, farmlands, mountains, and every other type of terrain. In one place storms come in from the east, in another it’s from the north; one place has a river to the west, another the sea in the south. You are located in among these global and local influences, and orienting your circle to them is the essence of this magic.
How to Find Elemental Associations
for the Circle of Eight
These steps are best taken over a period of weeks or months. You might change the order from how they appear here to make the process work for you. The steps should be taken as suggestions rather than a rigid procedure.
1. Open Discussion
Begin this process with an open discussion, where everyone gets a chance to talk about the elements. Points you might like to cover in this discussion include:
• each person’s relationship to the elements, magically and literally
• each person’s previous magical and ritual practice (if any) with locating the elements in particular directions, and the level of their commitment to those pairings
• a brainstorm of possible elemental associations with directions for your particular location
2. Exploration within the Circle
Place three or four expressions of each element in the center of the circle. For example, you might include a wand, a feather, and a scent infuser for air; a candle, burning incense, and a box of matches for fire; a chalice, a seashell, and a spritzer with scented water for water, and a rock, a crystal, and a flower for earth.
Ask each person, seated in their direction, to pick up and handle the different objects, noting their reaction to them. You might like to do this work in a light trance. Afterwards, share your feelings.
You can also ask people to pick up different objects and move around the circle with them into various directions, feeling their responses to this. Again, share your experiences afterwards.
3. Exploration into the Directions
Travel to locations you feel are associated with the directions of your circle. If you have already set up a geographic Circle of Eight, travel to those places. When you are there, look around you. Notice the ways the elements are represented in each place. If you don’t have a geographic circle set up, visit places such as a nearby river or local mountain, park, or monument that lie in the directions around your circle. Again, notice the presence of the elements at each place, their strengths and characters. Be aware these might change during the course of a year, from season to season.
4. Focused Discussion
Bring all your thoughts and learnings into one discussion. This time, explore the areas where your understandings differ from each other or from the standard arrangement of elements, remembering that what you arrive at might not be modeled anywhere else.
Some parts of this process might be:
• Think about and discuss your group’s priorities in assigning elements to directions. Is it to stay true to your locality, no matter what? It is to match up to standard Pagan elemental designations? Is it to create something completely original? Once you know this, it will assist you with the rest of the process.
• Find out where the overlaps are—what everyone agrees on—and begin with that. If everyone agrees, for example, that water must be in the west—whatever the reasons—then you have one clear marker to begin with. Or everyone may agree to assign elements only to the quarters and not the cross-quarters, or to seek unique elemental representations in each direction—elements with names such as mountain, storm, river, and sunrise.
• Create a map of your Circle of Eight on a large piece of paper, maybe on top of a literal map of your area or otherwise just with the eight directions and characteristics or places your group already associates with the different directions. Make some colored elemental symbols on separate pieces of paper (a blue wave, a red flame, a depiction of wind, a tree or mountain) and try moving them into the different directions like pieces on a game board. If you are thinking of having two directions for each element or two elements in some of the directions, have several of each of your elemental symbols.
• Undertake a trance journey as a group into the etheric level of your Circle of Eight. Visit each direction in turn, asking for further information. While it is most likely each person will receive different information, it may fit together; one person may receive sensations of wetness, another of coolness, and another of uncertainty or strong emotion, but all of these may be aspects of water.
5. Test Your Correspondences
Even if it is imperfect, start testing your model out. Set a time for this testing, such as two or three months, and revisit the discussion after that time. Some things remain imperfect and others come to make sense as we work with and adapt to them.
Elemental Work in the Circle of Eight
Usually, in any circle, the person standing in or holding a particular direction calls to the element associated with that direction when the circle is cast and thanks it at the end, when the circle is released. You can also work with the elements in many other ways. In the Circle of Eight, people do not get to choose the element they are holding at any particular time; it is part of the sequential movement of the wheel, and over time everyone gets to experience each of them.
Here are some suggestions:
• During a ritual, the people holding the directions of the elements can contribute that part of the ritual—for example, in a dark moon ritual, the person in the air direction can direct the visioning trance, the person holding water can create a ritual of release and renewal, fire can lead the energy raising, and earth can be in charge of both the grounding and the sharing at the end. Or during a Spring Equinox festival, the air quarter could be responsible for the chants and music, the earth quarter for coordinating the decoration of spring eggs, the water person for blessings of each other, and the fire person for a spring dance.
• You can work with the elements to explore a theme or magical working more closely, each person viewing with the eyes of (and speaking with the voice of) their elemental association. For example, if you are creating a ritual for the Summer Solstice, each person holding an elemental direction can bring that understanding into the ritual; what is the fire experience of the Summer Solstice; the air experience; the water and earth experiences? If you are working with a myth, you can explore it through elemental understandings; where is water in this myth; air, fire, earth? What are they telling us about this story and how to work with it?
• Use the elements for inner work. During the time you are in a direction associated with a particular element, delve deeply into your relationship with that element—the favorable aspects and the more challenging. If you are holding fire, you might discover that although you value your creativity and your passion, you have an issue with anger and have never felt able to express or listen to it properly. Working with fire as an ally, devote yourself to exploring this in ways you can support. You can do this ritually through personal or group process, or literally by working with the element directly; you might choose to make candles, to learn to lay and light a fire, or to take part in a fire-walking experience.