Correspondences
In any spiritual or magical tradition, you will find the idea of correspondences between ritual items such as directions, elements, colors, herbs, minerals, days of the week, and planets. The assumption is that you should use ritual items relevant for a specific intention that are related by their correspondences, to make your rituals more effective and powerful. For example, if you are doing a fire ritual you might use direction and color correspondences of the south and red, for instance by placing an altar in the south and using red candles, flowers, or minerals.
However, when we look at correspondences in cultures or traditions, we see a divergence of thinking about them, and even between sources. Cultures also use different elemental systems.
Differences based on direction and element correspondences include:
Differences based on direction and color correspondences include:
Why do these differences exist? Factors that affect correspondences include the tradition, the concepts used by a tradition, your physical location, and the local geography or climate. You may even have a personal preference that is different from commonly accepted ideas.
In traditions like the Golden Dawn, ritual work occurs in a temple constructed in the astral or spirit and is divorced from physical locations on the Earth. Traditions like Agrippa are associated with concepts in Western astrology, with the elements being associated with the equinoxes and solstices. If you work in a nature-based tradition, such as Celtic or Norse paganism, you will use correspondences that are appropriate for elements in your location.
The direction associated with winter and summer will change depending on the hemisphere you are in, with North associated with winter and south with summer in the Northern hemisphere, and vice versa in the Southern hemisphere. This might explain the correspondence of red with the south or north.
Geographical considerations such as large oceans being in a specific direction would explain why blue or black is associated with the west in locations such as the Western continental United states, or with the east in Asia. The same consideration might apply if there is the presence of a mountain range, jungle, desert, or prevailing wind in a particular direction. This may respectively give rise to a directional association for earth, water, fire, or air, or for a color correspondence for white, green, yellow or red.
So, which set of correspondences should you use? As we have seen this can depend on correspondences used by or concepts behind a tradition, your location, or personal preference. A set of correspondences is not “right” or “wrong” with the key metric being do the correspondences that you use result in effective ritual work?
When starting out it is useful to follow a convention, with practitioners in western traditions typically using the Golden Dawn and Agrippa correspondences. However, feel free to diverge from these norms if you feel intuitively that a difference approach is relevant for the tradition or location you are working within, or that match your personal work.
The blog image is by Johannes Bahrdt - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0