The Earth Element

This will be a long one..brace yourselves 😄

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.

Posted by Damnata
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.

Yeah, I wish.

With all the above things being said, I am now more inclined to believe that I'm more Firey than Earthy. I'm FIRE DOMINANT after all. That Earth Parent - Fire Child reminds me so much of the relationship between my MUM (a taurus) and I (a Virgo with strong Fire placements).