the-astrology-book

Temperaments
Lewi, Grant. Astrology for the Millions. 5th ed. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1978.
———. Heaven Knows What. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1969.
Star, Gloria. Astrology & Your Child: A Handbook for Parents. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 2001.
———. Astrology: Woman to Woman. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1999.
TEMPERAMENTS
The theory of temperaments, or complexions, incorporated four basic qualities: hot,
cold, wet, and dry. These four qualities varied by season, gender, age, and person. The
ideal of Hippocrates was to lead a balanced life, because if the body is balanced, then
disease is less likely to take hold. The method of creating balance combined diet and
regimen, and encompassed such lifestyle issues as frequency and type of exercise, time
of eating, and sleep patterns.
The entire ancient scheme was based on the four qualities: hot, cold, wet, and
dry. Hot and cold were one pair; wet and dry the other. From a behavioral perspective,
hot is exactly what one would expect from the common parlance: someone who reacts
vigorously to anything even remotely perceived as an attack. “Hot under the collar” is
exactly on target. A cold type is basically lethargic, or slow to react, often perceived as
being unemotional, but “slow to react” would actually be closer. The expression “cool
under pressure” is also a good fit.
Dry represents anything with a discrete shape or structure, while something
wet adapts its shape to the container. Dry thinking is characterized by making distinctions,
while wet thinking sees connections. A new example of wet thinking is “hyperlinking”;
the World Wide Web is a good example. A dry thinker is more easily swayed
by intellectual argument than by passion. A wet thinker fits emotion into the picture.
Dryness is the position that a moment is unique, that reality can be objectively
known. Yet one other way to contrast the two is to say that the epitome of dry thinking
is clarity, and the epitome of wet thinking is ambiguity. And yes, the very process
of attempting to explain the concept is dry!
Each of the four qualities actually represents a cluster of concepts. For example,
the qualities hot and cold do not represent extremes of a temperature continuum, as one
might define them. They represent qualities of energy, where hot represents high energy
or physical heat, and cold represents low energy or physical cold. But these qualities are
opposites in a critically different way from the way one normally envisions them. Take
temperature: From a purely chemical perspective, molecules in a hotter gas vibrate more
rapidly on average than molecules in a colder gas. Mixing hot and cold gases will produce
an intermediate result. In other words, the cold portion is completely canceled out
by a portion of the hot component. But this is not how it works—at least as far as the
qualities, and not chemistry, are concerned. Opposites do not cancel each other out.
Thus, people have hot and cold qualities simultaneously. In fact, having “half
and half” would be to manifest equal quantities of each, not to have a “zero-sum state”
in which hot cancels cold, perhaps producing lukewarm.
Finally, this is where astrology comes into the picture. Hippocrates put forward a
workable theory of qualities, but other than general distinctions of age, gender, and
THE ASTROLOGY BOOK
[649]