Fire - Earth - Air - Water

I think I posted this before but I am going to bring all of them here.

From the book "Astrology for Lovers," written by Liz Green.

The Element of Fire

We can accept the unpleasant more readily
than we can the inconsequential.
GOETHE

The cycle of the zodiac begins with fire, the gift which Prometheus stole from the gods to give to man so that he might have hope and a possibility of growth and development. And if we are to make any sense of those peculiar fire signs - Aries, Leo and Sagittarius - and their often incomprehensible but always dramatic behaviour in life and in relationships, we must, as with all the zodiacal symbolism, think for a moment about fire itself. With all the myriad forms that fire can take we can make two general comments about it. Firstly, it brings light into darkness. Secondly, it cannot be contained in one shape, one size, one form. It is volatile, unpredictable. So, too, with those people who belong to the astrological element of fire.

You may see some common descriptions of any fire sign in any good astrological textbook, or more reputable newspaper columns: warm, outgoing, self-centred, dramatic, lucky. The fire signs seem to have it all over the others in terms of sheer chutzpah. No one can quite top an Aries for daring; no one can beat a Leo for personality and impact; no one can come miles within a Sagittarian for a roving, adventurer's eye. But what really makes fire people tick? All those lovely descriptions are not much use if you happen to be in a relationship with a fiery temperament and are subjected to the more exaggerated idiosyncrasies of fiery behaviour. What does life really look like through fiery eyes, and what do they really need from a lover, a partner, a friend?

One key thought which might help: to the fire signs, life is an endless sea of possibilities. As long as there are opportunities to explore, open doors through which to pass, new twists and turns in a future that is still in formation and in which anything might happen, then the fiery type will be reasonably content - if contentment is a word one can apply to this restless, volatile psyche. But as soon as you take away the possibilities, close the doors, plan the future too rigidly, and remove that little bit of chaos that makes the world go round, then the fiery type panics.

You have taken the very thing which nourishes them - their ability to shape creative things out of random possibilities. And as soon as you've done that you've lost them. Some people need security more than anything in the world. Not so the fire signs. While they like a little, too much of it is like burying them in clay. They suffocate.

Never mind talking to them about reality and responsibility. They see it perfectly clearly, thank you very much. It's just that this isn't their reality. The 'real' world to a fire signs is secretly that fantasy world which was suppose to end when the last fairy tale book was tucked away in he cupboard and the brutal truth about Santa Claus was made known. Look into the secret reality of the fire signs and you are in a world of pure romance, pure myth. Fire signs need to mythologize everything: other people, professions, situations, themselves. For fire, all the world's a stage, and no one plays the part with such panache.

You may have met that common-fire sign propensity to make vast Himalayan peaks out of perfectly ordinary molehills. It wasn't just a little disagreement, it was a Holocaust. It wasn't a nice film, it was Wonderful, Brilliant, Mind-Shattering. The overwhelming and contagious enthusiasm of the fire signs is hard to resist; so, too, is their anger. Fire signs often exaggerate their behaviour, dramatize it - even when they are alone. They aren't just spoiled brats trying to attract your attention. They need this fantasizing, this injection of brilliant colour and sound into the grey and banal fabric of what the world is constantly insisting is reality. Fire is not interested in the pragmatic approach to life. Take away a fire sign's fantasies and visions of how life might be, and you have crippled them. It is, truly, that serious. If there's one thing sacred to the fire signs, it is their dreams.

You may find the fiery types somewhat egocentric and insensitive. In some respects, they are - as regards the details of earthly reality. But it isn't really insensitivity. It's just that forcing a fire sign to focus his broad and all-encompassing vision on something so temporal and boring as a fact is positively threatening to him. If he stares at a detail for too long he feels that he might miss something.

Fiery people like to get the gist of the picture without getting trapped in it for too long, so that they can take their sensitive, colourful impressions and place them in context with all those other impressions they're collecting about life. This is why so many fire signs are ardent and restless travelers. They like to get a taste of the world, of life, of current events, of cultures, of people.

The future is the most fascinating thing on earth to a fire sign. The past is a novel someone else wrote, the present relevant only as a potential doorway into a whole network of possible futures. When confronted with the incessant and monotonous demands of the material world, the fiery type may often drop the situation like the proverbial hot potato and move elsewhere. This has earned them the accusation of irresponsibility or callousness. Not so. It's just that they cannot bear to be imprisoned.

A few more significant comments about the fire signs, before we look at them individually. It is best that you get a clear picture of the type, for they are less likely than their earth, water or air relatives to be able to explain themselves to you. After all, knights on white horses never have to offer explanations in the fairy tales.

There is that wonderful gift that some fiery people have for the magic 'hunch'. Have you ever watched a fire sign assess a situation? They will rarely analyse the components, or if they do, it will be in an afterword, to justify themselves to some pestering earth sign who doesn't believe in hunches. But the fiery type seems to be able to get an instantaneous perception of all the undercurrents going on, and to come to a snap conclusion which just seems to 'happen' in their head. They rarely know how or why. They have an excellent nose, which often flies against the apparent facts of a situation, yet is unerringly accurate. You might even call this mysterious sixth sense a little magical. Actually what has happened is that they have used functions of the psyche other than the senses and the rational intellect to assess the situation. What other function, you may well ask. Why, any fire sign can tell you: intuition.

For these reasons fire signs appear to have a lot of luck. They are the ones who win the races and the pools, invest in the one stock which climbs when the market is collapsing, set up a company to see a product which is suddenly needed in two year's time, peer into the smoky lens of the future and write books, make films, design fashions that are a prophecy rather than a reflection of now. And what happens when it goes wrong and the business collapses, the market crashes, the deal doesn't come off? Never mind. Somehow, some way, a solution will appear. There is an infuriatingly unquenchable trust in the future with fiery people. If you meet them when they are down and out, never mind, it will all come out right one day, somehow. And what is maddening is that it usually does - if they haven't hooked up with some partner who stomps all over their dreams and convinces them that the way to happiness is the regular small salary cheque, their semi in the suburbs, 2.3 children, 1.5 dogs, and the in-laws over for Sunday dinner each week. If you find any fire signs living like that, get out your handkerchief. There is nothing sadder than a noble knight in rusted armour trying to clip the hedges in Neasden.

Ah, they are romantic, these fire signs. They sound almost too perfect, too magical, too heroic. How can you resist them? Not many people can. Have they no vices, then?

Remember what we said about every element having a secret dark side? Well, here it is, then, the secret vices of he element of fire. A little scenario might help to make this clear.

EARTH: Have you remembered to pay the telephone bill, dear?

FIRE: Telephone bill? (Beginning signs of irritation.) Yes, dear. Look, I'm trying to concentrate on this piece of writing. It's not going well.

EARTH: I've asked you at least a dozen times. We'll have the phone disconnected if you don't pay it.

FIRE: (Feeling guilty because he hates being accused of being irresponsible.) If you stop nagging me, I might remember to pay it. (Translation: I can't really cope, don't remind me.)

EARTH: You wouldn't remember. If I don't remind you nothing would ever get done. We'd have no telephone, we'd be thrown out of the house, there'd be nothing to eat, the children would have no clothes??_

FIRE: (Losing temper) Will you just for once leave me alone? Now you've ruined my concentration. I can't write any more this evening. Why must you bother me with such petty rubbish? It will get paid.

EARTH: (Taking martyr pose) I'm the only one who does any giving in this relationship. I cook and clean and pay the bills and you just sit there staring out the window dreaming. Why don't you get a proper job?

FIRE: (Later, to his mistress) She just doesn't understand me. She crushes my creativity.

EARTH: (Later, to her solicitor) I want the house, five hundred pounds maintenance per month, and the car. I have to take care of myself, after all

We can summarize the difficulties of the fiery signs by the following general pronouncement: the element of fire has a problem coping with the everyday world. Despite their wonderful vision, intuition, dash and insight, the world is, unfortunately for fire signs, full of the presence of objects and stubborn, conservative people. The world for many fire sign people, appears to have definite malice aforethought in its tendency to thwart them. They must either conquer it in grand style or withdraw into their strange world of fantasies. These frustrations may take the well-known and beloved form of government structures and red tape, traffic laws, taxes, bills, the necessity of earning an income, and the problem of remembering to feed, clothe and take care of that old incubus, the body - which, after all, is made of the substance of the world.

So our fiery friends, though they may be wonderfully successful in any enterprise which entails speculation and the inauguration of creative ideas rather than routine and bondage to detail, often cannot leave the house without forgetting car keys or wallet or drive down the street without incurring a traffic violation - if the car will start at all, brute beast that it is. It is this kind of experience which forces many fire signs into the 'misunderstood genius' syndrome. But it is not really society which is creating the problem - albeit it is all too frequently too conservative, too stolid, and at least twenty to fifty years behind the leaping intuitive vision of fire. It is the secret, unknown, unconscious world of the senses, of matter itself, which poses fire with his greatest problem. And it is often his body itself.

I have known a great number of fiery people, who hold an active dislike of their bodies. This may range from dislike of the appearance - and here the peculiar fantasy life of fire is most evident, for the person's body may be, by popular standards, very beautiful. But there is just something about flesh itself - flesh divorced from the glamorous, hazy images as though seen through a gauze, denuded of its associated symbols, flesh that gets sick, grows old, produces hair and warts and perspiration and cellulite - which is a mystery and a terror. It may be concluded from this that many fire sign people are hypochondriacs. You would be right if you guessed that.

It isn't really the poor Virgos; they merely worry about the possibility of germs and disease, which is something else altogether. But fire is afraid of his own body, for it seems, all to often, like an enemy, an intruder, something into which he feels stuffed, as it were, like a sausage into a sausage-skin. Some fiery people will even admit to you, after a couple of whiskies and if softly asked, that they don't really want to be in a body at all, it's too confining, too restrictive, too 'formed', somehow. They are blithe spirits, volatile, burning marshlights, and dragging around the inert old thing is a damned nuisance - bearable if it goes on running, bloody difficult if it doesn't. A good many health freaks and dietary divas and macrobiotic and massage masters are fire signs trying to deal, albeit, in a rather exaggerated way, with that unknown and fascinating world of the senses.

Which takes us to the thing which will interest you the most, if you are involved in a relationship with the fiery trigon of signs: their sex life. At the risk of incurring an appropriately fiery explosion from my fire sign readers, it must nevertheless be said that the fiery temperament is more prone to feelings of sexual inadequacy than any other group. Feelings, I said. It has nothing to do with performance, about which many fire signs are so obsessive that, were there competitions to determine such things, they would undoubtedly walk off with all the awards. The secret, vague, nagging feeling that one is a sexual failure. It comes from all that lack of understanding about the body. If you don't make friends with your body, your sexuality is going to remain a mystery to you, and you may often feel as though your body is going about its own business while you have nothing whatsoever to say in the matter. And another funny thing about fire is that, being so rooted in the world of fantasy, the body becomes unreliable, and is likely to show the evidence of emotional frustration, resentment, fear, and anger quickly as various forms of what we politely call 'sexual problems'. They are not really sexual. They have to do with the rather tenuous relationship fire has with the earth plane. But they can wreak havoc in relationships nonetheless.

You see, fire lives, if you remember, in a world of fantasy. Objects by themselves are at best boring, at worst frightening. They have to be invested with meaning, charged with glamorous or romantic connotations. In other words, objects become symbols to a fire sign. Simple appreciation of the body and bodily sensations is difficult, without the appropriate fantasy. So the element of fantasy in a fire sign's romantic relations is liable to be very strong. By fantasy, we mean anticipation, visualization, expectation, need for erotic stimuli verbally, visually, imaginatively. No one loves the strip club or the porn cinema or the erotic photograph or the black silk underwear quite so much as the fire signs. In fact, this element of fantasy is often so strong with a fire sign that it can become more important than the actual sexual act itself. Sounds strange? Not to fire. Sex is, for them, a thing of the mind as much as the body.

Fine, you may say. Erotic fantasies are normal, to be encouraged. We live in an enlightened age. At least, we're suppose to live in an enlightened age. But the problem comes with the choice of partner that fire signs make. We will go into this in much more detail later. Suffice it to say, for the time, that the fire signs as a group are attracted most strongly to earth. And earth is the most literal, the most basic, the most sensual, the least prone to fantasy of any of the astrological elements. So what happens? The poor fire sign often feels as though there is something wrong with him, since his partner is getting off on his hairy chest or muscular arms or cute little paunch while he is desperately trying to conjure the atmosphere of Mata Hari meeting Clint Eastwood in a '30s club in Berlin by candlelight with Marlene Dietrich singing Gestapo songs in the background.

The matter-of-fact approach of earth to sexuality is likely to make our fiery type a little uncomfortable. He may feel as though he (or she) is obliged to 'perform successfully', which is a disastrous expectation. In fact, expecting any kind of earthy performance, sexual or otherwise, from fire is likely to lead to disaster. Unless their fantasy is with them, fire signs often go impotent or frigid. This stems from the complexity of fire's approach to their senses. But the fire sign who 'fails' is liable to blame his partner, since it is very uncomfortable to blame oneself. And the blame may be one of several types.

There is the 'I simply can't perform like a machine every second Thursday', variety. (Subsidiary subplots run to: 'Not tonight, dear. I have a headache' or 'I had a long day at the office etc.') There is the 'Our sex life has become boring, there's something missing from it' variety. (Subplot involves either the 'together couple' who explore silk undies/strip clubs together, or the less together couple who try to replace those elusive fantastic possibilities with 'open' marriage, wife-swapping, lovers, etc.) Fire, like blondes, has more fun? Don't kid yourself. It's no fun having to prove yourself constantly by playing Don Juan or Donna Juana to every available contestant just to make sure you're actually a member of the human race.

Over-compensation, that most common of human traits, often surfaces in the fire signs either in attempts to prove sexual prowess or attempts to prove material prowess. (Even athletic prowess.) The difference between the fiery sports champion and the earthy one, though they may seem, to the casual observer, to be the same, is that the earthy gymnast - sexual or otherwise - enjoys the sensations, and does it because it feels good; the fiery gymnast aims to win, because the act is not nearly so interesting as the anticipations and the recollection.

Romantic liaisons, for the fire signs, often begin as a fairy tale and end as a cage. No fun at all, since this propensity for unreliability in relationships leads to tremendous loneliness and a big fat sense of failure. And to complicate things, fire sign people often find it hard to articulate their needs - partly because fantasies are hard to put into words and partly because, even if they could be, more stolid types have a habit of stomping all over them. As Mick Jagger sings, 'What can a poor boy do except join a rock-and-roll band?

Fire signs are very prone to violent physical passions, which they call love. This unfortunate scenario usually ends with the sad revelation that all cats are grey at night. They can become cynical and brutal, masking their tremendous romanticism and idealism; always seeking restlessly for that spiritual soul-mate who will secretly understand the fears that drive them without demanding that they explain themselves, who can fan their little hearth fire into a mighty creative conflagration; who will contain them without imprisoning them.

Are there such people? Not likely. Only in fantasy, since any red-blooded partner, whatever the astrological element, cannot always provide a new scenario every night. Sooner or later the fire signs must learn to balance their vision with a little realism and a little appreciation of the things of the earth. The present can be just as interesting as the past and the future. Facts can be just as exciting as possibilities. But balancing is not the same as changing. Anybody who thinks they can tame fire into a meek domestic creature is liable to get badly burned.

From the book "Astrology for Lovers," written by Liz Green.

The Element of Earth

The trouble with always keeping both feet
firmly on the ground is that you can
never take your pants off.

J.D. SMITH

Since earth is what we all stand on, build with, draw sustenance from and in which we are inextricably rooted, it might be said that the element of earth in astrology is a symbol of the three-dimensional world of matter, the observable conjunction of space and time. Earth is real, earth is solid, earth is reliable and factual and present. And the earthy signs - Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn - possess, as their basic mode of experiencing life, an attentiveness to and a recognition of all that occupies the senses. Earth represents the reality function par excellence. Or, if we are to summarize all this, earth people are above all else realistic.

Now realism is a dangerously relative term to anybody but an earth sign. After all, there are lots of different kinds of realities. But an earth sign will tell you, 'That's all very well, but nevertheless, regardless of all your theories to the contrary, what I perceive is what I perceive, and therefore I will work with that and make something of it'. Earth is not interested in why, how, what might be, what was, what could be. It is interested in what works. Pragmatic to the end.

What is really important in studying astrology is not to catalogue behaviour traits, but to understand the real essence, the innermost motivation, and way of experiencing life that a sign - or a group of signs belonging to one element - share. Hence, if we catalogue the traits of Virgo, Taurus and Capricorn, they will not do justice to this fascinating, apparently simple, underrated and undervalued element. Probably fewer earth signs study astrology than any other group; I have found fewer Taureans and Capricorns in my classes than any other signs. Virgos tend to like the systematization, and therefore come because they find it useful. But the true earth personality has no time for abstruse cosmological speculations. He is much more interested in what is going on at this moment in this world, how to deal with it, how to master it, how to build security and safety in a chaotic cosmos, how to apply his skills to carve out for himself a life that is productive, useful and full.

Most textbook descriptions of the three earth signs share some common adjectives. For example: practical, efficient, full of common-sense, sensual, realistic, well-organized, fond of money and security and status. To a great extent this is true. In the sphere of reality - or what we consider to be really via the senses - the earth type excels. Somehow, to the mystification of more intuitive, volatile people, they manage to make order out of the random array of stimuli which assault the senses by relating to each experience or object individually, studying its laws and its nature, savouring it, and moving on to the next, gradually building up a body of facts and experiences which allow them to function in life by dealing with the things of this life. Render unto God what is God's, and unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The fire signs tend to spend a lot of time on God, while the earth signs court the careful acquaintanceship of the needs and expectations of Caesar - or, as the Cathars would have said, of rex mundi, the Lord of This World.

Earthy people tend to be at home with their bodies. They like bodies, they feel comfortable clothed in flesh; often they believe themselves to actually be their bodies. If you ask a group of people individually, 'Who are you?' and ask for the first honest spontaneous answer, you will see the elements very quickly coming to the fore. The intuitive will seek to articulate - if possible - that he is his innermost spiritual essence, his creative source. The earth sign will tell you, or experience himself as, his body. After all, what better friend than his body? It is as far as many of us know of reality. So earthy people are usually healthy, because they neither repress nor undervalue the needs of the body.

They are at home with objects, and can usually manage money and responsibilities in an apparently effortless way which is most upsetting to their fiery comrades. Earthy people have a gift to actualizing their desires. They take the time to explore all the practical aspects of a situation, and do not reach for what is impossible. So they are successful in those areas which require discipline, hard work, application, diligence, patience and care. Fire is much too sloppy to be bothered with this kind of patience. Earth knows that every birth must be preceded by a gestation which is awaited with tenderness and caution.

If your eyes are fairly kept close to the ground, you won't miss much on the path you are walking.

The problem, of course, is (as the quote at the beginning of this chapter humorously points out) that if you keep your eyes fairly closely to the ground, you never get to see the sky; and you are likely to form a picture of the universe which, rather than spanning the broad, interconnected canvas of fire, will be bitty, and reduced to constant monotonous round of daily details and facts. The failing, the one great danger with the earth signs lies in the secret dark side which we have been talking about. Because there is a tendency to ignore or undervalue or repress the wilder, grander, more fantastic visions and leanings of their natures, earthy people are prone to dogmatism, narrowmindedness, over-possessiveness, over-simplification, and a compulsive ordermaking. Just as the details of mundane life threaten the fire sign's vision, too much vision threatens the security of earth. Fire fears order; earth fears disorder. As the French poet Paul Val?ry wrote:

The world is constantly threatened
by two things: order and disorder.

Because the innate chaos of life, its randomness, its movement, its incessant propensity to shift and change, are so terrifying to earthy people, they have a tendency to build bastions in which they can retreat and feel safe from the ever-present threat of the unknown. As fire loves what it does not know and has not yet seen, earth cherishes what is known, familiar and trustworthy. Life is, perhaps, a paradox containing both. While earthy people can manage with ease the complexity of the world of objects, they are dangerously liable to miss the inner significance of their own lives. Because of their fear of chaos and that which is unknown or changeable, earthy people are often beleaguered with irrational fears and vague apprehensions.

Sometimes you will see earthy people who have stomped so ruthlessly on their imagination, their intuition, that they live in an endless grey twilight of labours and routines that, while gradually increasing the pile of objects around them, never ease the real hollow space. And deep inside you can hear the plaintive cry, the longing for some sense of purpose, some feeling of being part of a larger life, some hope for the future. All those labours make it hard to live creatively. Another way of putting all this is that the earthy person's problem is : he doesn't know how to play. He has forgotten the state of childhood, which doesn't leave us just because our bodies are 'adult'. There is a secret child in all of us, full of wonder and na??vet? and the hope is that life will bring surprises, joys, bounties unexpected - like Santa Claus on Christmas morning. If fire is the eternal child, earth is the eternal old man or old woman. He is often old when he is young, being more sensitive to and more willing to undertake responsibility; and this very gift which allows him to look realistically at what he must accomplish in life, is also his greatest enemy. Unless he can break loose from the treadmill of his bondage to what he calls reality, he is especially liable to fear death as the final reckoning: a definitive summation of his own life, whose underlying significance has somehow eluded him.

Fire signs often have a terribly intense secret longing for the very security, stability, and 'ordinariness' which in public they may be heard to condemn as drab and suffocating. Earth signs, by contrast, have an equally intense, equally secret, equally unspoken longing for the spiritual. This is frequently in the guise of superstition, which is even more embarrassing, since they are so quick to demand the facts, and so apparently anything but gullible. But there is no more spiritually gullible element than earth, although you may have to get your earth sign friend drunk to get him to admit that he knocks on wood all the time, won't pass under ladders, and has a horror of spilling the salt. Earth signs are often fascinated by ghosts, psychism and other para-psychological phenomena which are an everyday part of life of fire. But the earth person will often not consider these things as part of the universe, a natural part which is perhaps not yet understood.

He 'believes' in the 'supernatural' in a covert way without recognizing the implications of such a world. So - predictably - he will look for these qualities in a partner. Earth is attracted to fire, just as fire is attracted to earth. The earthy type will often be seen in careful, systematic pursuit of a love-object which symbolizes the medium, the inspiration, the creative spirit - the guide who can share with him the secrets of the cosmos, the bringer of drama and fire and life. Unfortunately these fiery partners, who may perhaps be in touch with some inner mystery, be it spiritual or unconscious, cannot parcel out this kind of insight like bread and cheese. Such experiences are wholly individual, intensely personal, and inexplicable in concrete terms. As Lawrence Durrell wrote:

Intuitives find language an obstacle, a clumsy hurdle. The eyes understand wordlessly - for words conceal more than they reveal.

You can imagine what sort of a problem it is for the earthy person to understand the abstruse and volatile symbolic language of fire.

For earth can accept nothing unless it is backed up by the testimony of his senses. He is often like a dog bound by a long lead to a post. He runs round and round, yet can never get beyond the circumscribed length of the chain - a chain forged by his insistence that the senses are the only means of apprehending reality. What a problem! The following is a typical dialogue one may overhear at parties:

EARTH: But don't tell me you believe in all that sort of rubbish.

FIRE: I don't 'believe' in it, and it isn't rubbish. I just know certain things. I've had experiences.

EARTH: Maybe you were on drugs at the time. What kind of experiences?

FIRE: Oh well, you know. I can't explain it. But I believe things happen which we can't explain rationally.

EARTH: Nonsense. Everything has a rational explanation.

At this point earth is thinking that fire is a loony, and the fire sign is thinking that earth is a narrow-minded bore. Reality v vision. What can a poor boy do?

Earth signs may be wonderful builders, providers, homemakers, conscientious servants of the needs of those they love. Their really big sin is never lack of care and effort. It is their lack of vision, which often stifles those who are close and crush their own as well as other's nascent creativity through over-insistence on the practical.

EARTH PARENT TO FIRE CHILD (who is learning how to paint/play piano/study philosophy/master the architecture of smoke-rings) Why are you wasting your time on that rubbish? You should be out learning how to make money.

We know well enough what this attitude has done to younger generations. You might say that the earth-sign viewpoint - understandable enough in an earth sign - became the common collective standard in our society for a time, after the horrors of two world wars and severe economic depression. We have by now two entire generations of dropouts and runaways who have rebelled violently against these excessively earthy values forced upon them by well-meaning parents who have lived through the economic and political nightmares and insecurity of this century and have forgotten that the future always contains new possibilities. Earthy people value only what they know and what they perceive through their senses, and they miss a lot that way. Who would like to spend his last shilling or hyacinths for the soul when a good bowl of soup will do as well?

The trouble is that earth will spend a lifetime providing others with the things he believes they want because he wants them himself. And when that fiery partner shows a predilection for hyacinths, it is like a slap in the face. The problem here is the same for us all: recognizing that different people see different realities and need different things.

Now let's talk a bit more about the earth signs in relationships. It should be pretty obvious by now that if an earthy person is reasonably satisfied sexually, and has a situation which gratifies his need for material stability, he will generally remain solid, loyal and immovable (or at least mostly) in relationships which would drive the other elements, particularly fire, wild. As earth gets increasingly secure, fire gets increasingly imprisoned. And although earth's sensuality will often lead him into extraneous affairs which are pleasurable in the same way as a really fine meal, he will rarely do anything to threaten the structure of a long-standing relationship or marriage if it satisfies his need for security and social acceptability. Ah yes, we didn't mention social acceptability. It is terribly important to earth, because society is a place where one can seek safety. Pillar of the community, and all that. Society is an earth-sign creation. It protects and sustains.

It upholds tradition and offers laws by which life and behaviour may be systematized. Earth people love all that stuff. Fire hates it. Fire is fiercely individualistic and will generally feel he is outside, beyond, or ill-fitted with society. Too conservative, traditional and safe. Ugh. There you have another typical problem.

EARTH: Darling, how could you behave like that in front of my friends? You shocked them. I won't be able to face them again.

FIRE: But all I did was talk about my belief that there are really flying saucers.

EARTH: But that stuff is nonsense, everybody knows it's marsh gas or the lights from Japanese squid boats. You made me feel ridiculous.

FIRE: You're so damned afraid of what everybody thinks. I have a right to express my own opinion.

EARTH: No, you don't. Not when it upsets people like that. It isn't normal.

Now normal and abnormal are two words you'll hear a lot in dialogues between earth and fire. Normally - whatever that is - is safe, stable, a measure by which earth can organize its reality. Abnormality is sickness. To fire, normality is a bore - who wants to be mediocre? Abnormality is simply another word for individuality to fire. Each secretly fears and desires the opposite. Earthy people would like, once in a while, to be perfect lunatics. And fiery people would like, once in a while, to be drearily ordinary

Because he bases his reality on what is in front of him, the fact that a partner is physically present, that a marriage actually exists, means that a relationship exists. All that stuff about 'something missing' is pretty incomprehensible to the earth signs. Duty. Loyalty, responsibility, commitment and security are much more important than wild romantic idealism. The subtler nuances of relating often escape him. Tragically, his partner often escapes him as well, seeking more of the chaotic burning stuff of spiritual passion and soul. It is fire who will usually abandon a relationship with an earth sign, unless the fire sign has one affair too many and the earth sign leaves out of wounded vindictiveness.

Sexual problems per se do not often afflict the earth signs. Inhibitions about fantasy do, though, they tend to be a prudish lot when it comes to the more exotic aspect of erotica. They appreciate the senses, not the imagination. You can imagine where this leads.

From the book "Astrology for Lovers," written by Liz Green.

The Element of Air

The intellect in every man is God.

MENANDER

'I think,' wrote Descartes, 'therefore I am.' This famous quotation ushered in the Age of Reason, from which we have not yet recovered. The society in which we live continues to uphold Descartes' maxim not only as the underpinning of its educational methods and philosophy, but also as the underpinning for what is considered ability or quality in an individual. We live in an age of tests of the intellect. It is the smart child who passes the IQ test with glowing ease who is considered the one to watch, the one to help, the one who will some day in adulthood, contribute most to the world he lives in.

But Descartes' proposition is a little tricky. For one thing, it is awfully lopsided. How about, 'I feel, therefore I am'? Or 'I sense, therefore I am?' Or even, 'I am conscious, therefore, I am'? The interesting thing about twentieth century Cartesians - and this includes virtually the entire spectrum of the sciences, education, economic and business studies, and even sadly, psychology - is that they still cling stubbornly to the belief that the intellect, the reasoning of faculty in man, is the only thing in him that is really worthwhile, and the only mode of judgment and evaluation that is accurate and truthful. Reasonable, we call these people. Rational. Logical. Lovers of truth. Astrology takes this perspective of life, and links it up with the element of air.

Now air, apart from being necessary for life and breath, is, of all the four astrological spheres, the least tangible. Fire can burn or warm you, water can refresh or drown you, earth can bury or grow crops for you. But you can't see air. Like the mind - on which endless philosophical speculations have rested for many centuries - air is volatile, breezy, shifting, clear, transparent, and, you might say definitely abstract.

Astrology uses picture language to describe certain truths about life and people. When you look at the traditional symbols which are associated with each sign, and with each element, certain things are communicated which fifty pages of conceptual dissertation fail to do in such a succinct fashion. Take the three images for the three airy signs. Gemini: the twins. Libra: the balance. Aquarius: the waterbearer.

Now look at the symbols for the other three elements. Fire contains the Ram, the Lion, the Centaur. Water contains the Crab, the Scorpion, the Fishes. Earth contains the Bull, the Maiden, the Goat. Notice anything? Right. Air is the only element without any animal symbolism. The air signs are, to sum it up in a word, civilized. No bestial behaviour for them. They think. Therefore they have a chance to think about morals, values, principles, concepts, systems, right and wrong behaviour, social rules, and anything else that can be processed into means for evaluating experience. In fact, the air signs are so civilized that the only inanimate object in zodiacal symbolism - the Balance - belongs to Libra, an air sign. I think, therefore I am human, and no longer animal. Air is the most human element, the quality which has enabled men to create societies, rules for living together, codes for ethics, writing, learning, and the vast and awesome array of gifts and curses which fall under the umbrella of modern technology. Air has made man master of his planet: or so he thinks.

Now what do you notice about a person who is predominantly airy in temperament? The old medieval word for an airy temperament was sanguine, and a sanguine person was always optimistic, never ruffled, never upset, always positive. First and foremost, the airy temperament is reasonable. He is less likely to go hysterical when things do not fall his way, because he has developed the knack of seeing viewpoints other than his own. He is objective enough to recognize that the world is larger than just him; so he is prepared to cope with disappointments and vicissitudes in a rather philosophical way. Even when angry, he will try to reason with his opponent, and he is a great adherent to the ethical code of integrity and honesty in all human dealings. He is usually prepared to consider society as an organism which is built for the benefit of those who belong to it, so that he will deliberately fight what he considers selfish or irrational behaviour. It just isn't fair, from his point of view. And because he is often well-educated, and at least self-educated, he has a wide variety of sources to draw for his attitudes and his beliefs. Air is rarely narrow-minded. He may be horribly narrow in other ways, but his mind is always open to ideas.

The airy person will, because of his constant propensity for reflection, rarely react spontaneously. He will assess a social situation carefully, rather than feel his way into it. He is logical, and must have explanation and names for the things which come into his field of awareness. They need not be tangible, but they must be explainable. He is sometimes so logical that he can make you scream, when he asks you to explain feeling states or moods or nonrational intuitions which in a million years do not lend themselves to the careful scrutiny of his analytical brain. He can make you feel as though you have teamed up with a cross between a computer and a refrigerator. Naturally those sterling virtues would have to be balanced with some pretty sterling problems. And air's greatest problem is what appears as coldness in ordinary human relationships.

Yes, air people can give the impression of being exceedingly cold. Not, mind you, in the ordinary social sense. There is no element so adept at the graces of group interchange: ordinary chit-chat about a wide variety of interesting topics, objective and intelligent discussion, stimulating conversation, genuine tolerance of others' viewpoints. But the arctic breeze brushes you sometimes when you are alone with him and you want to talk about how you feel, and he does a lot of thinking about how he feels, and some more thinking about how you feel, and then a lot about how he thinks he thinks he feels, and by the time he has got around to working it out to his satisfaction - structured, named, analysed, evaluated and slotted into the grid which to him offers the final differentiation of his values in life, the moment - as they say - has passed.

Having already said that there is no such thing as total objectivity, it should be said that the air signs as a group try harder than anybody else to achieve it. And they do come close; they have the priceless gift of being willing to consider people, events and ideas outside their own personal range of experience as equally valuable and deserving of attention and energy as those things that touch their personal lives. In fact, it's sometimes weighted so heavily on the larger picture that the smaller picture - particularly that of personal relationships - often recedes into the misty distance and you are left feeling peculiarly unimportant and ashamed of your own demandingness.

Well, nobody's perfect. Without the element of air, we would still be hitting woolly mammoths on the head with rocks, and there never would have been a wheel; it is the element of air which gives us the ability for abstract thought.

Another way of getting some understanding of the airy temperament is to watch the way an air type strives to understand things. He will perpetually ask why, in contrast to his fellows who will either react with a simple 'I like it' or 'It's horrible', and leave lofty speculations about the nature of man and the cosmos to the philosophers. Questioning the structures behind the manifest world comes as naturally to him as breathing. Even on a prosaic level, the scientific minds of air will be at work ferreting out the secrets of the economic structure of a business, the composition of fertilizer, the organization and systemization of farmland, the tensions and pressures and laws at work within social groups. One key word for air is reason. Another is logic. And a third, equally important, is system. Air is the element of systems. Everything must have a coherent pattern. If it doesn't fit into the pattern, either the airy type will make up a new pattern - often called philosophy, psychology or religion - or he will refuse to recognize that thing is a reality. Things that don't fit into patterns are extremely inexplicable patterns of behaviour, unwonted emotions and moods that do not fit into the schema, unusually charismatic or strangely magnetic personalities, and actions that do not stem from any obvious cause. Watch the air signs when something like this, some denizen of the oceanic depths of the nonrational side of life, smacks him in the face like a mermaid's tail flicked out of the water. You can virtually see his brow furrow as he begins the long chain back to what might possibly explain this phenomenon, so that he can understand it. Expecting him to accept something without understanding it is hopeless. He must understand everything. His whole picture of the universe rests on his capacity for comprehension. Take it away and you will see a very frightened individual.

A long time ago, I noticed that the field of psychology was full of air signs. At first this struck me as odd; after all, apart from the odd pastimes of chasing rats in the laboratory which go under the misnomer of academic psychology, the field itself deals with the 'soul' of man (the word means the study of the soul), and thus concerns itself with inner states, mainly emotional. I expected lots of Scorpio and Cancer and Pisces. Instead I found an overwhelming number of Aquarians, large groups of Geminis, hordes of Librans. Eventually it began to come clear. The air signs, because they must understand everything, must make systems to describe the phenomena they encounter in life. The one phenomenon they perpetually encounter and find perpetually difficult to comprehend is the human being. Hence psychology: for air it is a way of understanding that which intrinsically cannot be explained, let alone defined. But as we said, air tries harder.

I suspect air signs gravitate toward astrology too, for the same reason. You find most of them working on the research side, attempting to systemize the cosmos itself. God, to the air signs, is alive and well and hiding in systems. Very well. It doesn't do to knock it, when for the element of air this is where reality lies.

We must, of course, talk a little about the dark side of air. It is, after all, such a light element by nature - sanguine. You might have guessed the dark side is pretty dark. And you can guess as well that the side of life which defies systematization most consistently, which refuses analysis and structure, which cannot be explained verbally or conceptually, is both the most annoying thing in the world to air and also the most fascinating. Emotion.

Air, as we said, can give the appearance of being rather cold. In fact, airy people are often afraid of this quality in themselves, and try particularly hard to show sentiment at the appropriate moment, lest they get the reputation of being heartless. The sense of being cut off is a common experience for those living with airy people. It is as though the person is there one minute and then gone, leaving his body sitting in the chair talking. But there is a distinct impression that the room is empty, that you are alone in it.

It is a highly amusing experience if you aren't involved, since you can see the flick of the light switch as the air sign abruptly pushes his emotional responses into the unconscious and the machine registers nil. It is exceedingly hurtful if you are in love, since it's like somebody cut the cord and left you utterly alone. But there it is. Air represses emotions he cannot deal with. By repress we don't mean control, either. That too. But it's much more serious than that. He just blanks them out. He's no more aware of them than you are. They vanish into the vault, and the surface reveals a smooth, glassy consistency. Angry? Of course he's not angry. Hurt? Don't be ridiculous. Jealous? Why, he never feels jealousy. You begin to feel distinctly crude and irrational and bloody-minded in the face of all that non-reactiveness. Don't let it fool you. You should recognize what he doesn't know about himself. The element of air masks an intensely emotional nature, which positively terrifies the pants off him. If he's lucky, it will remain unconscious for a long time. Or maybe I should say, if he's unlucky, for the longer he blocks off his feeling responses, the worse the inevitable explosion will be. Yes, inevitable. Nothing dies that isn't lived out. Psychic energy doesn't vanish because you don't like it. It just goes underground and then surfaces when your back is turned some dark night.

Beneath the sanguinity is a lot of sensitivity, an acute sensitivity that allows the airy person to be much more easily hurt than others and much more deeply wounded. It also causes him to be more inclined toward emotional dependence, and a profound need for tenderness and sympathy which he cannot for the life of him ask for in any straightforward way. The other elements, when they feel weak, frightened, needful, jealous, hurt, angry or rejected, or wildly in love, will tell you so. Earth will buy you flowers, maybe, and fire will write you a flamboyant poem. Water will positively inundate you with emotion. But air? Why, air will discuss the weather. What did you expect? Or the political situation in Iran. Or the state of the labour unions. And if you're a telepath or know something about astrology, you can learn to pick up the body language, the dilation of the pupils of the eyes, the movements of the hands, the feeling tone, the intangible communication of an emotional fact that - if he faced it - would embarrass him immensely.

Be patient. Nobody blushes like an air sign.

Emotionally, in short, the air signs - most sophisticated of all in the realm of thought and understanding - are children. They have the entire spectrum of a child's nature too, both the dark and the light. On the one hand, their na??vet? is touching and beautiful, and every emotional experience has a depth and meaning which the more jaded types quite miss. Air can really be enchanted, because on this level he is childlike, and children still respond to wonder. He can also be touchingly trusting, in a way which makes you always want to show your best face and treat him with integrity. The idealism inherent in his feelings is a powerful pull toward living up to the ideal. There is a purity of emotion, a lack of worldliness, which he may find embarrassing, but which is a rare and precious gift if you happen to be the recipient.

He also has the egocentricity, dependency, crankiness, clinginess and oversensitivity of the child. Remember the tantrums that children throw when you neglect them? Well, you may never see a real tantrum. More likely you'll see a sulk, or a very subtle coolness which makes its point loud and clear. You rejected me. Now I'm going to reject you. So there. This kind of sulkiness and unconscious moodiness is very difficult to endure if you don't understand it. Especially when you try to tell him about it. The dialogue runs something like this:

'What's the matter, dear? You seem to be in a bad mood.'
(Translation: You've gone cold. What have I done?)
'Nothing's the matter. I'm not in a bad mood. I'm perfectly all right.'
(Smirk of secret satisfaction that you've been rebuffed and noticed.)
(Translation: I never have moods. It's you that's emotional and moody.)
'But I know something's wrong.'
'Look, just leave me alone, will you? I keep telling you nothing's wrong. Don't be so damned demanding.'

This is a classic scenario. And the annoying part of it is that the air person isn't lying. He's telling you the truth as he understands it. He always tells the truth, which is one of his great failings. (Like when you look terrible, or he announces to you that he isn't sure if he loves you today.) He really doesn't know. And for him to ferret out what has happened means he must become aware of his own emotions. Which means the hurt he imagines you dealt him, the neglect, the jealousy, the whatever that is the last thing in the world he wishes to admit he is experiencing. It just isn't civilized.

No question about it. Of all the elements, this strange animal is the most difficult of all in love affairs. That is, if you aren't an emotional telepath. If you are, then you're all right, for the glory and the tragedy both of the airy people is that when they really give their hearts, like children, they give them forever. The trouble is that they can give it and not know it, and leave the relationship (or be left) and discover it thirty years later, when it's much too late. One of the paradoxes of human nature displays itself in glowing colours here. Each element of the zodiac is related to a sphere of life, and each has a special gift for expressing in that sphere of life. But each element also has a secret underside which is just the opposite, like the undertow of a tide as it's coming in. In behavioural terms, air is a somewhat chilly element. But if you really pierce the layer on the surface, and get past that constant analyzing and rational structuring that goes on habitually in the airy mind, you will find that the airy person's feelings run deep and strong - so deep and so strong, in fact, that they terrify him. Emotionally, air is a child. A child's feeling nature is na??ve, intense and not very flexible. In feeling matters, air simply isn't very sophisticated, although you'd think from all that polished charm and the ease of which he flirts and chats and makes clever innuendoes that relationships are an easy matter for him. Not so. What you have, really, is all the vulnerability, sensitivity and needfulness of a child's feelings in an adult's body. And a good piece of advice to anyone involved in a relationship with a strongly airy temperament is: handle with care, for the person usually isn't aware himself or herself of the depth to which the emotions can reach.

Airy people can often be infuriating because of their lack of warmth in close relationships. You get the feeling they are treating you the same as everybody else: fairly, with polite interest, but nothing special. But if you can understand this side of air's nature, and coax it into expression gently (airy people often come near to paralysis when confronted with violently expressed emotional demands), then you're rewarded with all the delicacy and depth of this na??ve but powerful love. Beneath the cool wit, air is an incurable romantic in emotional realms, and is truly incapable of using feeling for diplomacy or manipulation. Children, after all, are the only true honest souls among us.

From the book "Astrology for Lovers," written by Liz Green.


The Element of Water

A sentimental person thinks things will last.

A romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Water, we are told by science, is the simplest of the elements: two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and presto!, we have water. Water is also the most unshaped of the elements: temperature can alter its constitution to ice or steam, objects impose their shape on it. The greater percentage of the human body - something like 85% - is composed of water. Water is all around us, the source of life. Water covers two-thirds of the earth's surface. And from water, the Koran tells us, all life begins.

The element of water, astrologically, is the most enigmatic of all the elements. It is the most 'primitive' in that it is further from the rational realm which we are pleased to call human thought. Look at the symbolism of the three watery signs: Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. All three are cold-blooded creatures in nature, very far on the evolutionary ladder from the warm-blooded mammalian kingdom which has produced its dubious fruit of man. All three inhabit areas of the earth where man cannot live: the depths of the ocean, the barren seashores, the desert. When we examined the symbolism of the element of air, we saw that there were no bestial figures among them. The Twins, the Scales, the Waterbearer. An absence of 'animal'. Now, when we look at water, we see an absence of 'human'. What this means is not that the water signs are 'cold-blooded' in the sense we colloquially mean it. Far from it. But it may mean - among other things - that the structures, theories, and principles of differentiated human thought are not the mode of operation of these ambiguous signs. The water signs move like the realm of nature: with instinct, at home with that which is nonrational, unexplainable, sometimes magical. They are all motivated with feeling - and feeling, as everyone except a few obsessively fanatical material scientists will admit, is not something you can measure by statistics, define by hypothesis, contain within rationally understandable laws.

Where does reality lie? In the greatest
enchantment you have ever experienced.

These are the words of the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. They describe one of the water signs' basic attitudes toward life: what is felt is real. And because what is felt is something terribly intimate and subjective, its reality is apparent only to the person experiencing it. Water signs are never very good at explaining themselves to people. Generally, they don't try, but rely on their sure instincts to take them through complex situations. They can rarely tell you 'why' they have done something, from a rational point of view. When pressed, the water temperament will either go sullen and silent, or begin to offer some very half-baked and patently absurd rationalizations. The language of the heart is not translatable.

It's amusing to speculate about things like the development of language and rational thought. We in the West place great emphasis on the processes of the intellect. Our inheritance is largely that of ancient Greece, with its concentration on philosophy and meaning and balance and rationality. The classical Greece which underpins our modern systems of law and education is an air-sign phenomenon. We have forgotten that there are other languages, other modes of communication. Touch, for instance. Feeling. Images and symbols. Colour and music. All these belong to the realm of the water signs. Many water people do not think conceptually, but imagine things in pictures. You can see them as children, excelling at languages, the arts, history, finding a lot of difficulty in mastering algebra, logic, chemistry and physics. It isn't that they lack intelligence. It's that their intelligence is more gifted in other areas. Today we consider the 'smart' child as the one who does well in IQ tests. But as a water-sign friend of mine once said, IQ tests are excellent determinants of how well a person does at IQ tests. Nothing more.

For water signs, the most important thing in the world is feeling, and in particular, the objects of feeling - which are usually human beings. Relationships with people are the breath of life to the water signs. More than any other element, they fear aloneness and isolation. They need the constant contact of other people, the constant flow of feeling, the security of love and relationship. A water sign who has pulled in on himself and withdrawn from others is a sad creature.

For many water signs, others are the most important thing in life - hence their sometimes rather suffocating tendency to live through others at their own expense.

Let's take a typical example of this tendency to live through others. Carl Jung uses an interesting analogy, in his work, of a relationship being a combination of two factors: a container and a contained. Picture it like this. One person is usually something like a large house with many rooms, most of them unexplored. The other person is like a small, comfortable, self-contained flat within that house. Both people, for a while, are content to remain in the warmth of the flat. It's safe, it's cosy, the alien world outside can't intrude. It's secure and unchangeable. You know its boundaries.

But the person who is the container becomes aware that the house is really much bigger than anybody thought. He - or she - begins to become restless. What's in all those unexplored rooms? What's the world like outside? Granted, it's unknown and probably unsafe. But it's fascinating just because of that. So the container begins to fidget, and finally he gets up with a torch and a length of rope and decides to explore the basement. The contained panics. Will he come back? Will he shatter the peace and security of their world? What will happen?

The contained in relationships are usually the water signs. Within their own world, they create anything, for imagination is one of the strongest gifts of this element. Water people have wonderful imaginations. They are also sensitive, perceptive and profound. It is rare to find someone with a strong water emphasis in his horoscope who is shallow and superficial. But they are frightened of anything that might disrupt the peace of the nest.

Not that water people never change. They change all the time - with a rapidity that is upsetting to the air signs in particular. But it's their feelings that shift and change. One day up, the next day down. Most water-sign people are moody. Now moodiness is something we tend to see as neurotic. This is our air-sign education again, establishing standards of consistent behaviour. In fact the feeling nature in any person is not consistent. Feeling is like water. It flows and shifts and takes a new shape depending on what it meets. And water people, at least those that are brave enough to express their real selves to others, are not consistent in their moods.

It never bothers them. They're used to it; and ups and downs are not frightening. Neither are anger or fear, love or hate. But these things are distressing to the more rational types, who can't cope with their own changing emotions. Water is also an incredibly subtle element. Nothing is simply black or white to the water signs. If you watch a typical television western of a decade ago, you can see the kind of values which air signs make: there are good guys and bad guys. To water, things aren't that simple. Good guys often have a secret bad streak, and bad guys are capable of acts of nobility. To water, people are complex and must be taken as they are, not as one would ideally like to think they ought to be. In this way, the water signs are the most realistic of all - that is, about human nature. They may not make a great noise about it. But they know. No person is wholly one thing.

There is a kind of relative quality about the values of the water signs because of this. They may have strong likes or dislikes - and this is one of their typical characteristics. Water people tend to react instantly to others. Yes, I like him. No, I don't. Often they can't explain why. Here's a typical air-water dialogue:

AIR: Well, what did you think of my brother?

WATER: I don't like him.

AIR: Don't like him? But he's my brother. Why not?

WATER: I don't know. I just don't like him. I'd prefer not to see much of him. There's just something about him.

AIR: What do you mean, 'Something about him'? What kind of remark is that? You must have a reason. Look, he's a really decent guy. He's always helped me when I've been in trouble. He gives a lot of money to charity, and votes labour. He's good to his kids, and faithful to his wife. How can you not like him?

WATER: I just don't like him, okay? I don't care what he does or doesn't do. I'm sorry he's your brother. I don't think he's very honest. Maybe it's his shoes. I don't know.

AIR: What a silly, irrational thing to say.

Silly and irrational. This is generally the attitude more radical people give when the water signs produce their instant feeling judgments. But water is democratic enough to know that his own response is not a universal one. Most water signs won't say 'He's an evil person.' They'll own up to the fact that it's their own feelings. It's just, 'I don't like him.' And that's that.

Feelings have their own logic, however. And the values of the water signs are just as complex, just as subtle, just as carefully built of associations and nuances as the theories and ideas of the air signs. It's just that the process doesn't take place in their heads. It occurs, in popular jargon, in the gut. Usually the water person isn't aware of the process. The whole intricate mechanism of establishing a set of values and measuring something against those values, takes place somewhere in the depths of the psyche. They don't know why. They just feel, one thing or another. Pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly, comfortable or uncomfortable: it's like the result coming up in the little window in the computer. The figuring is done inside, through processes which defy the intellect. The infuriating things is that they're usually right in their assessments.

Another facet of this peculiar ability to 'sniff out' the feeling quality of a person or a situation is a thing which we call taste. Now, taste is a very difficult thing to define. It connects up with all kinds of things like aesthetics and art and beauty. These are so hopelessly relative that you can get into a good flaming row about it any time. Taste is a deeply personal matter. But good taste seems to be something that the water signs possess in abundance. But knowledge of the theories of aesthetics often produces monstrous tastes.

I once attended a lecture with slides about the work produced by a particular school of art - by the artists' definition - were primarily comments on social and political states. They made powerful and important statements about the depersonalization of urban society, the oppression of the working-class, and other ideological attitudes. They were incredibly ugly. Worse, they were tasteless. There was a violent debate among the audience following the show of slides. Several people protested that these might be valid and important socio-political statements, but to define them as art was a dangerous thing. They might or might not be, depending upon who looked at them. Four people in the audience were particularly vocal in their disgust. I inquired later about their birth signs. They were all water signs. The objets d'art have offended their taste. They could accept them on the level of political and social statements.

But they were ugly. They were offensive to the eye. Here is the subjective judgment: I don't like it, it doesn't please me. It's a simplistic but good illustration of the difference.

Water and air see very different realities, and value very different things. To the air signs, the idea is everything. Feelings must be subjected to the dominance of the idea. To the water signs, feeling is everything, and the idea must be bent to the feeling. Air, for this reason, tends to be more liberal in its politics - sometimes excessively so. 'Humanity' is always a big issue for the air signs. Water tends to be more conservative in its politics - sometimes excessively so. 'Humanity' is not a relevant concept for the water signs. It means nothing. Mrs. Thomas across the street who at eighty cannot pay her fuel bills because her pension is too small - well, that's a reality, provided you know Mrs. Thomas. One Mrs. Thomas is enough to influence the political viewpoint of a water sign.

You can argue unto eternity with these two. They are both right; they see two sides of a coin. Water sees what is here and now, the reality of the pain, suffering, loneliness, dreams and needs of other human beings. Air sees what ought to be, what should be, what from an idealistic point of view might be. Because the water signs can't grasp broad principles very easily, they can often become bigoted in a small way. Rarely in a large way, because they aren't concerned about large wholes. But if one Black or one Jew or one Arab offends him, a water sign will often form a value judgment against the entire race or nationality. Why? Because he personally, had a bad experience.

The water signs are usually pretty well acquainted with the darker side of human nature. Because they are naturally sympathetic, people unburden themselves, and they learn a lot of secrets. They are also acutely sensitive to all the undercurrents of feeling within a person, whether they are spoken or not. They have a strange ability to feel what somebody else feels, and enter into his emotional state with ease. For this reason many water signs make wonderful priests, doctors, counselors and teachers. The gentle, delicate touch of the water signs never prods or pushes. It just shows empathy and understanding. And it opens hearts. The trouble is, there has to be a direct, personal contact. Discuss human suffering in the abstract and it means nothing to water.

Show him an individual who is in trouble, and he will respond.

With all these virtues, you might expect some pretty strong vices. They can be phrased in one simple word: reason. Water signs have a problem with reasoning. I'll say again that this has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is something which has many different ways of working. You can have a person who is a brilliant mathematician and who is perfectly stupid about other people. You can have someone who has wonderful insight about people yet can't add to save his life. There are all kinds of intelligence. One is probably no better than another. With the water signs, the intelligence is of the heart. It's intelligence about people, what they need, how they feel. But water isn't a very objective element. It's hard to see beyond the garden wall.

Consequently, water people are often unreasonable. They are also often unfair, which is infuriating to the air signs. They will quite blatantly set one standard for themselves and another for others. And you can't argue with it, because they can't argue. If they try, you will get the most amazing flow of opinions second-hand, make-shift ideas, 'they say' and 'everybody knows', third-hand quotes from unread newspapers, and a lot of completely irresponsible declarations that may or may not exist in reality. In other words, water is capable of bending the truth, for 'truth' as an abstract is something known only to the element of air. To the water signs, there are a lot of truths, depending on which side of the apple you bite.

Some water signs are charmingly infantile about the world of abstract ideas. This is the 'helpless female' type of both sexes who knows 'nothing about all that political stuff' because it's just so terribly complicated and boring. These people - and it should be emphasized that they are not only women, since I have heard it from a number of water-sign men, as well, under the guise of 'I'm only a simple labourer working to make a living' - refuse to recognize that 'society' is not some abstract thing that knocks on the door when it's time to pay taxes, but is a conglomerate of individuals. In a word, water can be pretty irresponsible on a broad social level. There is a story told to me about a water-sign woman who formed a friendship with an IRA terrorist wanted by the police. She didn't know his extracurricular activities at first.

When she found out, she didn't do anything at all about it, despite the vague and uneasy feeling that he was the one responsible for the deaths of twelve people. Asked why, she said, 'But he's such a nice man. He's always been nice to me. If that other is true, it isn't any of my business, is it?' Charming. But it gives you pause for thought??_

Instead of rational thought, you get opinions. Instead of objective conversation, you get gossip. Instead of disinterested observation, you get bigotry. This is the uglier face of the water signs. It runs along side by side with the compassion, the gentleness, the empathy, the wisdom, the understanding. But as any water sign can tell you, nobody is only one thing.

Water's biggest problem in relationships is that he can often see nothing except relationships. This translates either as suffocating solicitude or clinginess or possessiveness. Now obviously it depends on your taste. The constant attention of the water signs to their loved ones is a gift not to be undervalued. Many air signs, frozen in their own feeling natures, misinterpret this tenderness and concern as a cloying possessiveness - not because it really is, but because they can't respond or receive the gift graciously. But the truth of it is that sometimes water is a little cloying. When the loved one is the most important thing in your life, it can be a little difficult for the loved one - firstly because he can never get away from you, and secondly because you've made him responsible for your own happiness. That's a pretty large burden. The water-sign parent who hates to see his or her children grow up is typical. When they're babies they need that love and attention. And water signs need to be needed. It's a basic trait in their nature. The best of them is brought out by someone else's need. They are literally capable of sacrificing their lives for a loved one. Air will sacrifice for an ideal; water for a loved person. But when that child grows up, he wants to breath fresh air, to move away into his own world. That's often when the water signs become frightened and begin to cling. What, leave me alone? After all I've done for you? The heavy obligations they place on their loved ones can be deadly. If you sacrifice your life for somebody, he's going to feel pretty guilty about it.

Nine times out of ten, he'll repay you with resentment, because nobody likes to feel that guilty. It's important for the water signs to learn to let go once in a while. And, even more important, to take for themselves, to balance the scales. If you are always the giver, it's a pretty lopsided agreement. The other person never has a chance to give himself; and after a while he'll begin to dislike himself for being so selfish.

We can put it another way. Water has the tendency, because it gives so much on a feeling level, to generate a lot of guilt in other people. And the list is very long, of water signs who are hurt by 'cold and unfeeling' children, lovers, husbands and wives who simply cannot endure the guilt any longer. It's known to the trade as emotional blackmail. Water is a master of the art.

Although he will always be there to help if you are in need, water sometimes feels rejected if you aren't in need. It's a perverse and difficult situation. If water isn't needed, his lifeblood isn't reaching him. What can he do? He may leave the relationship himself, because of the
'coldness' with which he is being treated. So it's in the arms of another lover - only to find with sadness that the new one has the same face as the old. Water signs tend to be fascinated and attracted, as well as irritated, by the air signs. Water admires air's detachment, his coolness, his urbanity, his distance, his aloofness. Many water people have a fantasy that this cool, detached airy partner is secretly an emotional child who really just needs a lot of love. True enough. But it can be pretty offensive if you are thirty or forty and your partner is still mothering you.

Without water, there would be no human relationship, no affection, no love. Too much of it drowns. Perhaps we could use a little drowning at this time in history, since we have been made to feel so ashamed of our own needs and feelings that we are guilty simply if we are inconsistent. Perhaps a little of the 'art of the small' is needed by everybody. And so the water signs have an important message to teach. A brain without a heart, like the tin man in the Wizard of Oz, either rusts into rigid paralysis, or destroys the world.

I wonder what sign the author is..?

Damn she's a virgo!

I won't speak for all air signs but that was one of the best descriptions of air as it applies to Aquarius that I've ever read.

HEART! GO PLANET!


sorry I just really wanted to do that!

Posted by NotYourAverageAquarius
I wonder what sign the author is..?

Posted by NotYourAverageAquarius
Damn she's a virgo!

I won't speak for all air signs but that was one of the best descriptions of air as it applies to Aquarius that I've ever read.

click to expand

As always NYAA, in your face.

And yeah, chick is really insightful. Honestly I felt the Earth definition fell short but the rest? Spot on.

Posted by aquasnoz
HEART! GO PLANET!


sorry I just really wanted to do that!

oh god I miss that...