The classical scheme of five elements is not chemistry. But as a way of noticing that a body is made of a planet, it is unusually effective.
The pancha mahabhuta — earth, water, fire, air and space — appear across Indian philosophy, medicine and cosmology as the constituents of the physical world and of the body within it. They are a classical framework, not a modern scientific one, and this book does not present them as competing with chemistry. What the scheme does supply is a habit of attention: it makes the continuity between a body and its planet impossible to overlook.
Prithvi
EARTH
Bone, mineral, structure, the sense of standing on something
Soil and rock — and the topsoil that took millennia to form and is being lost faster than it is made