Almagest

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The earth element

general summary for a chart with a dominant balance of the earth element (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn)

What the tradition reads

Earth is the second of the four elements the tradition sorts the zodiac by, belonging to Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn, and it is read as the opposite temperament to fire in almost every particular: where fire wants to move, earth wants to build something that stays built. Alan Leo's Astrology for All reads the earth signs in terms that agree with one another: Taurus as slow, plodding, patient, enduring, persistent, executive and matter of fact, remarkable for its conservatism, and Virgo as constructive, able to make the most of its conditions, blending the ideal with the practical. Read together, the tradition takes an earth heavy chart as practical before it is anything else, patient with slow processes, careful with material things, and reliable in the sense Leo gives Taurus, someone who finishes what has been started rather than leaving it for someone else. The tradition's caution about too much earth is a stubbornness that mistakes what has always been done for what should be done, and its caution about too little is a chart that can imagine brilliantly but struggles to make anything of it stand up in the world. Earth signs are read as naturally sympathetic to one another, forming the wheel's other great trine, and a chart's balance is assessed by simple count, by planet and sign, rather than through any one placement taken alone.

The story

Earth is one of Empedocles's four classical elements, fire, air, water and earth, and Wikipedia's page on the astrological sign credits the association of the signs with these elements as an important development in characterising the twelve signs once astrologers took it up. Wikipedia's page on the classical elements records that Aristotle, in his On Generation and Corruption, related each element to two of four sensible qualities, and named earth as both cold and dry, the same pairing later astrology kept attached to the earth signs after the physics itself was abandoned. Astrology assigned three signs to earth in the same evenly spaced pattern used for the other elements, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn sitting four signs apart around the wheel; the page calls these groupings triplicities for exactly that reason, each classical element tied to three signs, and the tradition reads the trine between them as a natural kinship of substance rather than personality alone. The same page reports the four elements as a direct equivalent to Hippocrates's personality types, and where fire was matched to the choleric temperament, earth was matched to the melancholic one, the temperament ancient medicine associated with deliberation, sometimes read as sadness, more often simply as patience carried further than other temperaments could manage. The physical theory beneath the scheme did not survive the modern understanding of matter, but the personality vocabulary built on it did, the metaphor of practical, grounded earth long since separated from any claim about the physical world.

Written from

Corpus key element:earth.