The cardinal modality

general summary for a chart with a dominant balance of cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn)

What the tradition reads

Alongside the four elements, the tradition sorts the twelve signs into three modalities, sometimes called qualities or quadruplicities, that read where in a season each sign falls: cardinal at a season's beginning, fixed at its height, mutable at its close. Cardinal belongs to Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, the four signs that open spring, summer, autumn and winter, and the tradition reads cardinal as the modality of initiative, the impulse that starts a thing, calls a meeting, begins a project, proposes the plan before anyone else has finished thinking about it. A chart weighted toward cardinal signs is read as one that leads rather than follows and prefers to originate an idea over refining someone else's, restless when nothing is currently being started, and more comfortable opening a door than being the one who keeps it propped. The tradition's caution is a tendency to start more than gets finished, a taste for the launch that can leave the follow through to whoever is still standing there once the initial excitement has moved on to the next beginning.

The story

The three modalities were fixed to the calendar itself: cardinal signs sit at the four points where the Sun crosses an equinox or a solstice, the moments the old astronomers used to mark the actual turning of the year, which is why cardinal is read as the modality of change and onset rather than of steady character. The scheme is at least as old as Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, which sorts the signs into tropical and equinoctial signs at those solstice and equinox points, fixed signs that follow them, and bicorporeal signs that follow the fixed in turn, a fourfold division later astrologers folded into three: tropical and equinoctial together became cardinal, fixed stayed fixed, and bicorporeal became mutable. Later astrologers kept the geometry and softened the astronomy into psychology, a modality became less about the literal turning of the season and more about a turning of temperament, the difference between the planet that begins a thing, the planet that holds it, and the planet that lets it go.

Written from

Corpus key modality:cardinal.