The four elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water; plus triplicities of Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable; plus 12 houses; plus 10 planets (and North Node and Fixed stars) all in different houses and in varying aspects to each other and the chart axis – and it adds up to a great deal of information to be gleaned from a birth chart. 2500 pieces of insight someone once worked out.
Trying to prioritise out of a blizzard of facts and pull together a coherent portrait of a personality and its potential is not easy. So in the learning stages of astrology it helps to separate the different strands and treat them in isolation. Remembering that not everything is as straightforward as it seems.
At a super-simple level:
Air = thinking and communicating, emotionally detached, ideologues. Gemini, Libra, Aquarius.
Earth = grounded in the material world, the body, nature, pragmatists and realists, builders in life. Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn.
Fire = inspirational, confident, strong belief in luck and their guardian angel being there, not always realistic, entrepreneurial. Aries, Leo, Sagittarius.
Water = self-protective to guard against being emotionally swamped, creative, dreamers. Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.
Carl Jung believed the element we lack is not an irrevocable deficiency but our gateway to transformation.
Which may go a way to explaining why strongmen/bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Reeves and Charles Atlas have either 1 or no Earth in their charts which seems counter-intuitive. Likewise the great protagonists for emotional health, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had less emphasis on Water in their charts than the other elements.
Others follow their main element. Henry Ford, the initiator of mass production with his automobiles, had 4 Fire signs as befits an entrepreneur. Only 2 Earth and 4 Air for enthusiasm and marketing.
Jeremy Corbyn, the UK left-wing politician has 6 Air signs which fits an advocate for a dedicated ideology. Though Jorg Haider, the late Austrian very far-right politician, was also awash with Air, so it need not necessarily dictate the content of the ideology.
Oddly the ‘thinkers’ who promoted communism – Marx, Lenin and Stalin had Earth tilted charts. Marx had no Air in his chart.
Most birth charts have a mix of elements usually with two predominating.
Fire Air – a hot air balloon, inspirational, over talkative, unrealistic.
Fire Earth – a bulldozer, super-charged energy and determination.
Fire Water – excitable, combustible, creative – fire makes water boil, while water puts fire out. Tricky balance to strike.
Earth Air – cool, detached, sensible.
Earth Water – creative and practical, can make dreams come true.
Air Water – a tricky balance to strike between head and heart, between thinking and feeling. Tends to wobble from one to the other.
What also has to be taken into account are the chart houses which themselves can be labelled according to the elements.
Fire houses – 1st, 5th and 9th
Earth houses – 2nd, 6th, 10th
Air houses – 3rd, 7th, 11th
Water houses – 4th, 8th, 12th
A Fire Sun will operate differently for example in a Water house than it would in a Fire or Air house. So an 8th house Leo Sun will not have the same exuberance as a 5th house one.
So the elemental balance of a chart can give a ready rule-of-thumb description of the personality. But like everything else in astrology it is not the end of the story.
Once all 2500 piece of insight are gauged it then depends – to a degree – on intuition as to what stands out as most significant. Or at least with practice what seems like intuition is really experience of what works.
The post Elements – Fire, Earth, Air, Water first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
