The Shape of Consciousness, Part 2: Empedocles’ Path to Redemption through the Elements

In Part One, I argued that consciousness unfolds not as a linear progression toward a final endpoint, but as a cyclical process of wholeness, fragmentation, and redemption.

If that model holds, we should be able to observe it not only in theory, but in the historical record of how humans have made sense of reality through paradigms of meaning over time.

In this second part, I turn to what I’m calling one of the most ‘enduring human orientations toward reality’ — astrology — to trace how the evolution of consciousness has expressed itself across all of recorded and archeological history. More specifically, I’ll examine how astrology has been simultaneously shaped by us and in turn, shaped us throughout this process of becoming conscious.

To do this, I will introduce a very ancient and foundational astrological concept that exemplifies this cyclical shape of consciousness: the elements.

While central to pre-Socratic thought (circa the 6th century BCE), they also appear in other ancient traditions such as the Rig Veda, which archaeology suggests may be tens of thousands of years old.1 Thus, this ‘enduing human orientation toward reality’ might embody the theologies and philosophies that came after.

The Architecture of Infinity

Hermes Trismagistus described the elements as the first principle of the universe.2 In the Hermetica, he writes that while all matter is composed of the four elements, “Mind is the fifth part, which comes from Light, and is bestowed on humankind alone.”3

This idea of “Mind” echoes the Hebrew concept nᵉshâmâh (נְשָׁמָה), or “breath,” discussed in Part One—a principle that imparts both physical life and spiritual consciousness.

Different thinkers identified different elements as the primordial element or the first one that transmuted into the others: water for Thales and the ancient Egyptians,4 air for Anaximines and the Kausitaki Upanisad,5 fire for Heraclitus and the Rig Veda,6 and earth (or Gaia) for the Greeks.

Rather than resolving which came first, the persistence of disagreement itself suggests something important: the elements are not static building blocks, but dynamic phases within a cycle that continually flows from one into the next.

This insight was most clearly articulated by Empedocles. His solution to “The Problem of the One and the Many” was to introduce “the Few”—the elements—as mediators between total unity and multiplicity. Each element rises into dominance and then recedes, creating a repeating cycle. This was the basis of his model of ‘the quaternity of time’:

“The cosmos is said to evolve through four stages which are repeated infinitely, as the hand of a clock circles continually through the four compass points. In the Age of Love, or of the One, Love melts all things together into an undifferentiated unity...In mythological terms, this is a Golden Age, an age before strife and separate ego-identities. In the following age, the counterforce—Hate, or Strife, or Separation—gradually disrupts this unity…The next or third age is the Age of Hate proper…the unifying force of Love has been driven altogether from sight and the universe is a hell of Hate and Strife. In the fourth age, the force of Love reappears and gradually expands again as Strife gradually recedes, restoring unity for a new Age of Love.”7

Empedocles’ model closely mirrors the redemptive cycle outlined in Part One: wholeness, loss, fragmentation, and repair. The elemental paradigm, therefore, assumes a cosmos that is not progressing toward a fixed endpoint, but continually recreating itself.

The Elements as a Map of Time

Using this framework, we can construct a narrative of the evolution of consciousness — one that uses astrology as both a mirror and a participant.

While the starting point is less important than the pattern, I propose the following mapping:

• Fire → wholeness and unity

• Earth → separation and material consolidation

• Air → abstraction and intellectualization

• Water → dissolution and crisis of meaning, leading to reintegration

• Fifth Element → the ingredient of reintegration (redemption)

To make this more tangible, I also draw on the familiar developmental arc of a human life. To be clear, this analogy is not meant to be used like Sir Edward Tylor’s “primitive error hypothesis”, moving from “primitive” to “advanced.” Instead it is meant to mirror our shifting relationship to where we source our meaning and orientation, whether that be a parent or the autonomy of adulthood.

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Animistic Consciousness: Fire or the Age of Love

If we liken this cycle to human development, this stage resembles the fetus in the womb — undifferentiated, fully embedded, and in total union with the mother. Animistic Consciousness reflects this state. The “self”, as a separate entity, is minimal or nonexistent. Humans experience themselves as continuous with nature.

This period has often been interpreted as a more egalitarian or “matrifocal” phase, with goddess imagery serving ceremonial rather than hierarchical functions.8 The abundance of fertility figures, such as those found at Jarmo, supports this interpretation.9 Archaeological evidence also shows lunar tracking systems dating back at least 30,000 years, often correlated with menstrual cycles.10

Astrologically, this reflects an “environmental theology”—a cosmos experienced as alive and unified. Shamanic practices, such as those practiced as megalithic sites, positioned humans as participants within, rather than observers of, this system.11 As much as humans created terrestrial methods to track the movement of the sky, astrology also shaped humans’ understanding of their co-creative embedded positioning in the universe.

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Mythic Consciousness: Earth or the Age of Separation

With birth comes separation. In this stage, the self emerges as distinct, but still dependent. This corresponds to Mythic Consciousness. Where Animistic Consciousness lacked hierarchy, this phase introduces stratification, centralized power, and organized religion.

Evidence of a historical social and cultural transformation can be found in myths worldwide, ranging from the Americas, Australia, Oceania, Eurasia, and Africa. These myths describe transitions from female-centered to male-centered systems. Women’s menstrual cycles shifted from being a sacred celestial symbol tied to life to a symbol of pollutedness and inferiority.12

This period saw thousands of years of power struggles between people groups, resulting in a pluralistic pantheon of gods ruled by one supreme god — which happened to be the god of the people who had just gained power. Religion also became centralized and a highly complex mythology including many different gods was recorded in ancient Sumerian (circa 3,500 BCE).

Bartel van der Waerden holds a theory that the ancient Mesopotamian’s astral theology underwent a shift from pluralism to one supreme ruler during this timeframe. Astrology proper followed suit by also becoming more systematized so that it could help a male priesthood and king to manage the state, ensuring stability, order, and harmony in the kingdom, and power over their enemies.13 The planetary deities also became predominantly male and the two planets associated with fertility, the Moon and Venus, were made feminine. The Sun became associated with kingship and was given dominance over the Moon.14

As a result of these hierarchical shifts, humans were seen as completely subject to the will of the gods. Thus, they started to find ways to communicate with them so that they could better understand their relationship to the gods and the gods’ relationships to each other, as well as appeal to them to change their minds. Humans created corresponding myths that shaped the meaning connected to different constellations and planets. However, astrology maintained an ordering that transcended hierarchy and periods of chaos. Characters in the sky changed depending who was in power but time remained the ultimate authority.

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Empirical Consciousness: Air or the Age of Hate

As children and adolescents’ autonomy develops, so does their ability to think abstractly and reflect on themselves. This stage corresponds to an increasing reliance on logic, measurement, and systematization. The world becomes something to measure, analyze, and control.

Historically, this Empirical Consciousness began with 730-years of data collection, resulting in the Enuma Anu Enlil—the longest running “scientific” experiment in recorded history.15 Although we call this “science,” the distinction between science and religion did not yet exist in Babylonian culture.16 This empirical experiment was the result of increasing pressure from the king for accurate predictions. Mesopotamian astrologers tried to perfect their craft by plotting more political, social, and economic data with celestial events, resulting in casuistic, if-then statements. The 8th - 5th centuries therefore produced a scientific revolution comparable to the transformation of European thought from 1500 - 1700.17

As a result of this documentation, the intentions of the gods were eventually removed from the equation and humans were left with “the inevitable relationship between present omen and future event, between astronomical observation and political action. Astrology then emerges as an abstract, logical, almost scientific means of managing the world. In astrology, modern science began its gradual, uneven development out of religion.”18

Astrology was shaped to pinpoint increasingly accurate forms of measurement and corresponding predictions. It strained against, acquiesced, and integrated increasingly mechanized and rule-bound worldviews. From Plato, Ptolemy and Aquinas, to Galileo, Newton, and Copernicus, astrology continued to absorb new ways of categorizing reality and measuring the sacred.

However, the increasing separation from inspired interpretation created problems over the centuries that couldn’t be resolved with further calculation. Essentially, astrology pushed back against this mechanical interplay between ‘fate’ and ‘free will’, insisting that its ordered form could not be caged and reduced to mathematical formulas sans its co-creative nature.

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Fragmented Consciousness: Water or the Age of the Need to Restore Unity

By the time an adolescent has become an adult, self-reliance and self-mastery become a focus. Virility becomes paramount, as is building and consolidating resources with the unconscious belief that they are protection from future harm. Any sense of interdependence is proverbially “lost” by this point. However, as an adult experiences heartache and loss, sickness and meaninglessness, that adult is faced with a crisis point: ideas and beliefs that we hold tightly about what we “know” suddenly become moot when we are faced with our own mortality and meaninglessness.

In this stage, meaning begins to dissolve. The frameworks that once provided certainty and safety no longer hold.

The dissection of the sacred has culminated in this stage of Fragmented Consciousness in thinkers like Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose questions have reflected humanity’s disillusionment with inherited structures of meaning — to the extent that we have become uncertain whether a god has ever existed, whether goodness, truth, and beauty are even possible, and what the meaning of life really is.

Astrology has absorbed this skepticism as an object with science relegating it to the fantastical. However, I would argue that astrology’s base essence as an enduring human orientation toward reality persists. It continues to offer what purely empirical and fragmented systems cannot: meaning, narrative, and relational orientation. In short, it’s not the mechanics that define astrology, but the practice.

For this reason, some are now moving away from defining astrology solely in its Hellenistic, horoscopic form and towards the base idea that all things in the cosmos are interdependent.19 While some posit that astrology was merely created for functional purposes, it misses the point that humans also engage in myth-making, storytelling, and meaning-creating because humans cannot function without meaning.20 That is what astrology has continued to impress upon us as much as we have changed its form.

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Redeemed Consciousness: The Fifth Element or the conduit for the New Age of Love

This brings us to the present moment—a fragmented crisis of meaning. Our relationships to each other, to the Earth, and to the transcendent are strained. But this rupture is not the end of the cycle. Rather, it is the condition for a Redeemed Consciousness.

“The Fifth Element” represents the mode of that redemption and reintegration. To Empedocles, it was the force of Love reappearing and restoring Unity. To Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), it was Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) falling through his taxicab roof…who also turned out to be The Fifth Element (aka Love) arriving to drive back Zorg and ‘the great evil’ (aka Strife and Hate) and restore Unity to planet Earth.21

In order to regain what was lost, restore unity, and usher in a New Age of Love, we must embrace Redemption and exchange the re-creative force of Love for the disconnection and stubborn ideas that we are islands that don’t need meaning or relationships; that everything worth knowing must be measurable; that hierarchy is a reflection of value; and that the Earth couldn’t exist without us.

Astrology has mirrored shifts in consciousness while also shaping them. It is one example of a feedback loop between a symbolic system and human perception, and in that feedback loop, we are continually seeking to understand our place in relation to the universe, to the Divine, and to each other and ourselves. Therefore, astrology is both reflective and constitutive of this return back to the beginning too.

While its form has been constantly reinterpreted and has evolved in correlation with consciousness, astrology’s function has remained constant and calls us back to that unitarian wholeness: it’s a participatory framework embedded in relationship. But it is also meant to inspire awe and gratitude — the fuel for the regenerative and co-creative act of the cyclical process of consciousness.

This reconnection to “breath” (nᵉshâmâh, נְשָׁמָה),22 to “Mind,”23 and to the fifth element that Aristotle called “ether”24 is the essence of redemption.

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