The Wisdom Keeper’s Element

This is an excerpt from the Elements of Work textbook included in the 2027 Mentorship program.

Each of the Darkwood archetypes helps us learn about an element; Wisdom Keeper’s element is Ether.

I first learned about Ether element in a Polarity therapy class as a student at the New Mexico School of Natural Therapeutics in 1997. 

I learned that Ether element represents our relationship to space, spaciousness, and the divine. It represents presence, peace, and stillness. 

I love that these qualities are seen as elemental, part of the foundational language of nature.

This means that presence, peace, and stillness are innate, not a luxury or proclivity, and therefore Ether element is part of our structure; we are wired to attain spaciousness and proximity to the divine. 

Ether element is also mentioned in the texts of ancient Greek philosophers, and poets, scientists and researchers throughout time.

They considered it the fifth element, or “quintessence”; that which governs the mysterious realms of gravity, space (as in outer), and the atmosphere of the divine.

The Wisdom Keeper uses Ether element to hear and translate the wisdom of the cosmos that pours in through her crown chakra.

But sitting in her earthly medicine tent, speaking the language of responsible, linear Saturn and wearing the mantle of wisdom garnered from discipline and responsibility, she could easily miss this transmission.

In the same way that we learned about Earth element via our electric, channeling archetype, The Priestess, we will learn about Ether element through the wonderfully terrestrial Wisdom Keeper archetype.

You’ll remember that The Priestess archetype needs Earth element to ground and steady her, a necessary container as she electrifies with channeled wisdom.

The Wisdom Keeper needs Ether element to create the spaciousness in her mind to keep her from feeling too-full to hear the cosmos, too know-it-all to prohibit Knowing even more.

The Wisdom Keeper could easily become too comfortable in what she knows-so-far, or burdened by keeping track of it all – filled to the brim and weighted down so heavily that she sinks into the moss like a stone.

The Wisdom Keeper is dense and earthly by nature.

She needs Ether element to effervesce through her being and keep the cosmic song ringing, just like the Priestess channels such intense electricity that she needs Earth element to steady herself.

In this way, The Priestess and The Wisdom Keeper, the archetypes that flank The Dreaming, have a special relationship.

Without Earth element, The Priestess goes adrift in the electrical currents of the cosmos. Though her “ways” might seem more Ether element, without Earth element she cannot get the job done.

Without Ether element, The Wisdom Keeper becomes burdened by her Knowing.

Though her “ways” seem more Earth element, she needs Ether element to remain open to infinite Knowing.

Learning about elements by studying what they help balance teaches us a lot.