The Four Elements are basics in astrology as well as in alchemy as well as in magick. Hence assigning all possible phenomena (and also impossible phenomena) to the Four Elements is a basic exercise for learning magick. But this exercise isn’t exclusively for beginners. Advanced students of magick assign all phenomena not only to the Four Elements, but do this exercise also with distributing phenomena over the seven planets of classic astrology, then the ten sephiroth (divine emanations or layers in the creation of the world) of the Kabbalah, the 78 cards of a deck of tarot, and other symbols of divination. This exercise is never over! You can always learn about new phenomena and divination systems, which you didn’t know before. In these cases you make this exercise again and again. There is no magick without these basics! If you want to learn magick, then you can’t skip this. You can only skip it for learning something more useful than magick. Because most people, who want to learn magick, never proceed further than to these assignment exercises. You can’t say that I didn’t warn you! You may now proceed if I couldn’t convince you to do something more useful instead:

Above is a freeze frame from Black Clover. It shows the Four Elements of magick according to Klaus Lunettes. He is a character from the anime series Black Clover. By the way, many of the characters of the anime series Black Clover have got quite funny names.

For example the name of Sol Marron is translatable as brown soil from French. Sol Marron is an earth-bender with brown skin. Lunettes in the name Klaus Lunettes is the French word for glasses. Klaus Lunettes is known for his trademark gesture of pushing up his glasses with his index finger. The names are funny, but they aren’t Japanese. Yami probably is the only exception. Yami is depicted as a foreigner and wields a katana. The Japanese word yami (闇) means darkness. Yami somehow uses darkness as his magick. So back to the different kinds of magick.

Oh, you couldn’t read what is written in the first picture? Sorry for that! These are the Four Elements of magick according to Klaus Lunettes: Hi (火) or Fire on the top, kaze (風) or Wind to the left, chi (地) or Soil to the right, and mizu (水) or Water at the bottom. I don’t know from where the fandom wiki gets its strange information, but that chi (地) isn’t tsuchi (土) and that the overview is showing chi (地) should by everybody be seen as obvious! Hono also is a strange pronunciation of the kanji for fire. So the fandom wiki proves to be useless for the topic of Black Clover Magick.

The Four Elements of astrology, alchemy, and magick usually are Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. But air is a such European concept that it must be replaced by wind in Japanese (and also in Chinese). Soil doesn’t always replace earth. This is rather seldom. But it helps to avoid confusion with other hierarchies.

According to Klaus Lunettes, the Elements further on top are weaker than the Elements further to the bottom, so that Wind and Water are stronger than Fire, so that magicians of the Wind Element have an advantage over and are able to defeat magicians of the Fire Element, while magicians of the Water Element have an advantage over and are able to defeat magicians of the Fire Element as well as magicians of the Wind Element. But this already doesn’t seem to work within the anime. The magicians in Black Clover can use the Four Elements as such. Each magician has to specialize in one Element. This also can be a sub-type of the Element. Only few talented magicians can have a second type. But both are the pure Element or sub-types of the Element! There is no kind of magick, which would mix the Elements!

So to the difficult part of the exercise now! Because the sub-types of the Elements aren’t mixes of Elements, so distributing each of the sub-types of Black Clover magick over the Four Elements is possible! These sub-types shall be the phenomena assigned to the Four Elements of magick in this exercise! Klaus Lunettes gives the following sub-types, but seems himself not to know how to assign them all correctly:

Oh yes, you still can’t read it. I can discover in this picture: kiri (霧) = mist, kemuri (煙) = smoke, baku (爆) = explosion, kō (鋼) = steel, dei (泥) = mud, suna (砂) = sand, den (雷) = thunder (and lightning), shokubutsu (植物) = plants, koori (氷) = ice, and of course the not yet introduced types of Black Clover Magick indicated with a question mark. These few sub-types are repeated in the diagram. Only the repeats let them look like they would be many more. There are many more in the anime, but there aren’t more in this diagram. Shokubutsu (植物) = plants is the only sub-type, which is given with two kanji. This is somehow inconsistent because air could have been given this way too. Perhaps the author didn’t realize it because replacing air with wind already is an established Japanese tradition. Koori (氷) = ice somehow is exceptional too because it is one of the very few cases, where a long o is described with a double o in Japanese.

So on this diagram are only nine sub-types, which need to be assorted to four groups, which are the Four Elements. This is very easy in some cases because sand is a type of soil, an explosion is defined as a fast combustion and as such it is a type of fire, ice is frozen water. Other sub-types are more difficult to assign. Smoke appears together with fire, so could be assigned to the Element of Fire. But it instead could be assigned to Wind because smoke is gaseous. Then you also can argue that smoke also consists of aerosols of ash, so that smoke should be assigned to Soil. Except if you would assign ash to Fire because ash is a product of combustion. Making wind visible on the other hand can’t be a reason to assign smoke to the Wind Element because being invisible is a common feature of wind. So this rather is a reason to choose a different Element. (By the way, the capitalization here isn’t inconsistent! The Elements are capitalized, the concrete phenomena aren’t!) If you decide that smoke is gaseous and hence assigned to Wind, then you certainly will assign ice to Soil instead of Water because ice is solid. Plants are traditionally assigned to Soil because they root in soil like birds fly with the wind or fishes swim in water. But because I also am a biologist, so I must object that plants also die without water or without enough warmth or if they can’t breath.

Here is important to know that some items and phenomena traditionally are assigned to certain Elements, but there is no dogma in magick! You are asked to choose what works for you and then to consistently stick to it. The most important point is to be consistent. Because you can’t do any magick if you aren’t consistent! So if some cases are too difficult, then don’t assign them immediately! Black Clover presents some more difficult sub-types than these of the above diagram. I for example wonder since years to where to assign the time manipulation of the King of Magicians.

If you think this anyway is irrelevant because such things exist only in anime, then you can as well immediately give up on learning magick! To learn magick means to invest time and efforts in things, which seem to be completely irrelevant! I already did warn you!