The Four Elements And Four Directions, seems a little off to me Options

I am hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.

In Wicca, they have the four elements combined with the four directions. You have North and Earth, West and Water, South and Fire, and East and Air. The four directions makes perfect sense, but the four elements doesn't.
The way it would make more sense to me is if Fire was opposite Air, and Water opposite Earth.

In our world, the fire is at the bottom and the air is on top, the water and earth are both in the middle and are opposite to each other.

Does anybody know a Wiccan tradition that had it this way?

Thanks

Wiccan quarter calling and concepts about the directions were adapted from Thelema, which was adapted from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was adapted from Freemasonry and bits of medieval Hermetic mysticism. Real, traditional "witches" do not and did not circle cast or worry about the directions. Neopagan witches (Wiccans and some other modern pagans because of Wiccan influence do). Raven Grimassi also claims that Italian witches cast circles in accordance with the placement of giant stars, but the giant stars he refers to were actually considered guardians of the seasonal quarters by the ancient Persons millennia ago and the stars are not anywhere near where they were in 3000 years ago in the sky and Grimassi is just Gerald Gardner Italian style. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/groan.gif)

Medieval magicians and Hermetic mystics were very interested in the philosophical elements and their correpondences, this goes back, in part, to Pythagorean mysticism (5th century BC) and Kabala (9 th century in writing at least). The body and all things were thought to be composed of 5 elements (earth, water, fire, air, spirit). We find the same idea in ancient Eastern sprituality.

In medieval mysticism, the East corresponded to the element of fire and the South with the element of Air (West with water and north with earth). This changed when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn showed up and created a standard for late modern-era (late 19th/early 20th century_) ceremonial magic.

In the order of "emanation" in the both the medieval Hermetic scheme (according to the medieval mystic Robert Fludd and others) and the Eastern scheme in Tantric yoga systems, air is most ethereal of the elements emerging from spirit and thus is associated with mind and space. Fire and light, associated with action and movement in space--putting thought into action--is the next element to come into existence and is denser than the previous element. Mystically it is the holy fire that links heaven and earth. Water is the next element to evolve and is associated with feeling and experience. So actually air and water are opposite in the modern schema as complementary pairs of thought and feeling. The last element to manifest is earth, which is associated with will, specifically the will to be and also the potential to be. It is associated with the logos. The complement of will is action (fire, the Southern quarter). The earth element and the fire element also relate to transformation in different ways.

The circle in which quarter calling is enacted also represents the wheel of the year, the clock, the moon phases, day phases, cycles of life, etc. One comes from spirit and emanates into form, moving from elemental air to fire to water to earth (spirit, thought, action, experience/feeling, form and formlessness. The path of return is from earth to water to fire to air to spirit--the same as if you were doing a meditation on the chakras.