The four elements

In Lesson 2 you saw that Ptolemy describes the planets by what they do: they heat, cool, moisten, dry. In Lesson 3 you saw that each sign belongs to an element. This lesson puts the two together, because the same physics lies under both. Grasp it and you grasp half of the tradition’s judgements before you read them.

The four qualities

Everything in the ancient world was made of four qualities, in pairs. Two are active, because they change what they touch: hot and cold. Two are passive, because they describe how a thing receives change: moist and dry.

Heat gathers like with like and makes things rise. It is what happens in fire and in life. Cold tightens, condenses and brings to a stop. Moisture is what lets itself be moulded, what flows, what mixes easily. Dryness is what keeps its shape, what resists, what separates.

Notice that none of this is good or bad in itself. A seed needs warmth and moisture to sprout; a foundation needs cold and dryness to hold. The benefics and malefics of Lesson 2 come from exactly this: warm and moist build a living body, cold and dry take it apart. But a wall is wanted cold and dry.

The four elements

Join one active quality with one passive quality and you get an element.

The pairs are not random. Each element shares one quality with each of its two neighbours and none with its opposite. Fire shares heat with air and dryness with earth, but nothing with water. That is why fire and water put each other out, and earth and air never blend well.

In the zodiac this shows up in the aspects. Signs of the same element are in trine; signs of elements that share heat or cold (fire with air, earth with water) are in sextile; and a square always joins a hot sign with a cold one. You will see this in the lesson on aspects.

The elements in the zodiac

The twelve signs fall into four groups of three, one per element. Each group is called a triplicity, and the three signs of each group form a perfect triangle in the zodiac.

• Fire: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius.
• Earth: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn.
• Air: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius.
• Water: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.

The order repeats around the circle: fire, earth, air, water, and fire again. So neighbouring signs are never of the same element, and the fire and air signs, the hot ones, alternate with the earth and water signs, the cold ones. It is the same alternation you have already seen between diurnal and nocturnal signs: fire and air are diurnal, earth and water nocturnal.

Each triplicity also has its rulers, three planets that govern it together. They are one of the five dignities, and they come back in Lesson 8.

The four humours

The same physics served medicine. The body, it was thought, was governed by four fluids, the humours, each with the qualities of an element. Health was the balance between them; illness, the excess of one.

From here come four words we still use without thinking of their origin. Someone with plenty of blood is sanguine: cheerful, sociable, confident. Plenty of yellow bile makes one choleric: quick, hot, ready to act and to anger. Plenty of black bile makes one melancholic: attentive, steady, inclined to sadness and reflection. Plenty of phlegm makes one phlegmatic: calm, patient, hard to shake.

Notice that the table is also a year and a life. Spring is moist and warm like childhood; winter is cold and moist like old age. Astrology, medicine and the calendar were one single way of seeing the world.

Temperament

Putting it all together, astrologers worked out a person’s temperament: the mixture of qualities they were born with. It is not read from a single point. The qualities of several are added up: the sign of the Ascendant and the planet that rules it, the Moon and her phase, the season the Sun is in, and the planets touching the Ascendant.

The result is rarely pure. Almost everyone is a mixture, choleric with something sanguine, say, and it is that mixture which describes the basic nature: the pace, the reactions, the kind of energy. It does not describe what the person does with it.

The site works out your temperament by this method, with the sources and the weight of each factor, in the Temperament report. For this lesson it is enough to understand where each quality comes from.

Reading a planet by the elements

This is the everyday use of all of the above, and the most important one for the rest of the course. When a planet is in a sign, it adds its qualities to those of the sign. Sometimes they combine, sometimes they clash.

Mars is hot and dry to excess. In a fire sign, also hot and dry, it becomes more ardent still: it decides quickly and cuts without hesitating. In a water sign, cold and moist, its heat is tempered: it acts in a more hidden, more emotional, less direct way. Neither is “the right one”. They are two different Marses.

The Moon is moist. In a water sign she is at ease, because the quality is her own. In a fire sign she dries out and speeds up. Saturn is cold and dry. In an earth sign, equally cold and dry, it is solid and slow, sometimes too heavy. In an air sign, hot and moist, it gains lightness and pays more attention to ideas and rules than to things.

With this reading you do not need to memorise what every planet does in every sign. You only need the qualities of both, and to ask whether they reinforce or correct each other.