The Elemental Genealogies: 1 Earth — Ground, Matter, and Stability

The first gesture of construal has always been to find footing. Across cultures, myth and ritual return to Earth as the ground of being: the mother, the soil, the bedrock of existence. In Greek cosmogony, Gaia is the primordial progenitor; in many Indigenous cosmologies, the land is not backdrop but ancestor, active participant in the unfolding of possibility. Earth, in its elemental construal, offers stability: not merely a physical platform but a field in which persistence and rootedness take shape.

Mythic Grounding

Earth is the generative matrix, source of fertility and sustenance. From Mesopotamian clay figurines to the Andean Pachamama, the soil embodies potential made tangible. Earth is not inert: it yields, withholds, and remembers. Myths often stage this tension — between the Earth as nurturing and the Earth as resistant, a source of both life and limit.

Philosophical Substance

For Aristotle, earth is one of the fundamental elements, characterised by heaviness and downward movement, seeking its natural place. Medieval scholasticism preserved this image: Earth as substance, weight, persistence. Early modern philosophy reframed it as “matter” — extension, resistance, a substrate that gives form a body. Even when relational ontologies began to dissolve substance into process, the echo of “earth” remained: matter as that which grounds potential by constraining it into persistence.

Scientific Grounding

Modern geology transformed Earth from static base into dynamic history: plates shifting, continents drifting, strata recording the deep time of possibility. Ecology reframed Earth as system: soil, rock, atmosphere, and life entangled in cycles of renewal and depletion. Earth became less the passive ground and more the active constraint within which possibility must be negotiated — food webs, ecosystems, planetary feedbacks.

Ontological Thread: Stability and Persistence

Through these shifts, Earth construes possibility as stability. It is the element of staying put, of resisting dissolution. But this stability is never absolute: it is always patterned, situated, contingent on forces that both hold and erode. In relational ontology, Earth can be read as the construal of persistence within interaction — the relational cut that gives things their apparent solidity, their capacity to endure as nodes within a field of flux.

Key Insights:

• Grounding potential: Earth as element symbolises the way possibility stabilises into form and substance.

• Constraint as affordance: Persistence is both enabling (support) and limiting (inertia).

• Relational endurance: What seems fixed is always relationally held in place, not absolute but phase-stable within a field.

To begin with Earth, then, is to begin with the possibility of holding form in a world of flux. It is to construe stability as an achievement of relation — the first layer in the genealogy of the elemental.