The four elements

In astrology the four elements are not symbols. They are an ordering system built from two pairs of opposites, and each element is one particular combination.

The two pairs

Everything rests on four primary qualities: hot and cold, dry and moist. One from each pair gives an element:

The twelve names in the last column are not interchangeable within an element; the guide to the zodiac signs takes them one at a time.

This is not a list but a grid: each of the four possible combinations appears exactly once. Hence four elements, not three or five.

What hot, cold, dry and moist mean

Not temperature and wetness, but ways of acting, as ancient natural philosophy understood them:

• Hot — drives apart, sets in motion, joins unlike things.
• Cold — draws together, slows, separates unlike things.
• Dry — holds its form, bounds, resists.
• Moist — takes form, connects, adapts.

From this it follows why fire and air agree (both hot) and fire and water do not (opposed in both pairs). The doctrine of aspects follows the same order: signs of one element stand in trine, signs of opposed qualities in square.

The link to the temperaments

The same four combinations carry other names in humoral medicine:

• Choleric — hot and dry, like fire
• Sanguine — hot and moist, like air
• Phlegmatic — cold and moist, like water
• Melancholic — cold and dry, like earth

This is not an analogy but the same system. Hence a classical reading begins by calculating the temperament: it is determined from the Moon's sign and phase, the ascendant and its ruler, the season and the planets on the angles — and everything else is read against it.

What the elements show in a chart

Not which type someone is. A chart always contains all four; what matters is the proportion:

• Which element predominates among the planets that carry weight — the lights, the ruler of the ascendant, whatever stands on the angles?
• Which is missing, and what does that absence mean for the flexibility of the whole?

Simply counting how many planets fall in each element misleads: it weighs the Moon the same as a distant, weakly placed Saturn.

See also: the signs, the aspects.