The Four Temperaments

The four temperaments are choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic. Each pairs one quality from the heat axis, hot or cold, with one from the moisture axis, moist or dry. Hot and dry is choleric, hot and moist is sanguine, cold and dry is melancholic, and cold and moist is phlegmatic. The grid below sets out the four with the element and the humor the texts attached to each.

The words began as medical terms. Galen, in the second century, wrote of four humors, and the Latin writers who followed him named a person by the humor said to lead the mixture. Over the centuries the labels drifted into ordinary English as character words: a sanguine forecast is a hopeful one, and a melancholic mood needs no gloss.

Astrologers took the scheme as a scoring method. A chart was walked factor by factor, each factor was given a pair of qualities, and the pairs were tallied to name a leading temperament and a second. This page describes the version this site computes: five factors, one vote each, with the tie rule stated in full. Every table on the page is generated by the code that scores the calculator.

The humoral frame held that the body was a mixture of four fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. The Hippocratic text On the Nature of Man listed the four, and Galen, writing in the second century, gave each fluid a pair of the primary qualities. A mixture in which one fluid led was named for it, so the word temperament, from the Latin for a mixing, meant the proportion itself. Physicians read it from the season of birth, age, climate and diet.

The astrologers attached the same four pairs to the parts of a chart. Ptolemy, in the second century, described the planets in Book I of the Tetrabiblos by what they did to heat and moisture: Saturn cooling and drying, Jupiter warming and moistening, Mars drying and burning, Venus warming a little and moistening more, the Moon moistening, the Sun heating and drying, and Mercury changeable. Later writers folded in the signs by element, so that a chart could be scored the way a physician scored a patient.

William Lilly wrote the version English readers know. Christian Astrology, printed in 1647, gives a chapter of its third book to judging the temperament of the native, and the chapter walks a fixed list: the sign ascending, the planet that rules it, the planets in the ascending sign or in aspect to its ruler, the Moon by sign and by phase, and the quarter of the year in which the Sun stood. Lilly set no numerical weights; the reader counts, compares and judges.

The modern reconstruction is Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum's, in Temperament: Astrology's Forgotten Key, from 2005. Greenbaum traced the method through the medieval and Renaissance writers and set out a scored worksheet with more factors than Lilly listed and points for each. John Frawley's The Real Astrology Applied, from 2002, gives a shorter version with weights of his own. The two books disagree on details, which is the point: the texts hold a family of methods, not one, and this site computes one member of it.

Five factors are counted, and each casts one vote for a pair of qualities. The first is the rising sign, read by its element: fire signs hot and dry, air signs hot and moist, water signs cold and moist, earth signs cold and dry. The texts put this factor first because the ascending degree was taken as the point that described the native most closely.

The second is the nature of the planet that rules the rising sign. The Sun and Mars count as hot and dry, Jupiter and Venus as warm and moist, the Moon as cold and moist, and Saturn as cold and dry. Mercury casts no vote: Ptolemy called it changeable, taking the quality of whatever it stood with. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto sit outside the classical scheme and cast none either, so this site names the traditional ruler: Mars for Scorpio, Saturn for Aquarius and Jupiter for Pisces.

The third is the Moon's sign, scored from the same element table. The fourth is the Moon's phase, hot while the Moon waxes and cold while it wanes, with the moisture set as the next section describes. The fifth is the Sun's season, read from the quarter of the zodiac the Sun occupies rather than from the calendar. The table below lists every quality the five factors can take.

Weights differ between authors. Lilly left the weighing to the reader's judgment, Greenbaum's worksheet scores some factors above others, and Frawley weights by a rule of his own. This site gives each factor one vote and no more, a choice made for transparency, not a claim about what the texts said. Hot and moist lands on sanguine, hot and dry on choleric, cold and dry on melancholic, cold and moist on phlegmatic, and the temperament with the most votes leads.

Ties are common with five votes, and the rule is fixed. When two temperaments share the top count, the winner is the one the earliest factor voted for, in the order the scorer walks them: the rising sign, then the Moon's sign, the Moon's phase, the Sun's season, and the ruler last. A fallback order exists in the code, but every tied temperament has at least one vote, so the factor order always settles it, and the calculator names the factor that did.

The Moon's phase is set by its elongation, the angle between the Moon and the Sun measured along the zodiac. At the new Moon the two share a degree; at the first quarter the Moon stands a quarter of the circle ahead; at the full Moon it stands opposite; at the last quarter it is three quarters of the way around. The texts split the cycle at those four points, warming through the waxing half and cooling through the waning half.

This site works from eight named phases rather than four quarters: new, crescent, first quarter, gibbous, full, disseminating, last quarter and balsamic, each an eighth of the circle. Heat follows the texts: the four waxing phases are hot and the four waning phases are cold. Moisture is a documented choice of this site, not a rule from the texts. The new, crescent and balsamic phases, the dark ends of the cycle, count as moist, and the other five count as dry. So new and crescent vote sanguine, first quarter and gibbous vote choleric, full, disseminating and last quarter vote melancholic, and balsamic votes phlegmatic.

The Sun's season is read from the sign, not the date. Aries, Taurus and Gemini are spring and count hot and moist; Cancer, Leo and Virgo are summer, hot and dry; Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius are autumn, cold and dry; Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces are winter, cold and moist. Ptolemy gave each season one leading quality, and the paired form is the later tradition's.

This raises a question the texts never raised. The tropical signs are defined from the March equinox, so the Sun enters Aries as spring begins north of the equator and as autumn begins south of it. Ptolemy wrote in Alexandria and Lilly in London, and the season vote assumes their sky. For a birth in Melbourne the sign says spring while the weather says autumn. This site applies the Sun's tropical sign everywhere, as the method is written, and states the question here instead of silently swapping the quarters.

The chart used here is that of Steve Jobs, chosen because the birth record is well documented. Nothing on this page reads the person. The chart is a set of positions, scored as any other would be.

The rising sign is Virgo, and its element gives the first vote: melancholic. The ruler of that sign is Mercury, and the ruler's entry reads no vote. The Moon is in Aries, which votes choleric. The Moon's phase is new moon, which votes sanguine. The Sun is in Pisces, which places the birth in the winter quarter of the zodiac and votes phlegmatic.

The tally comes to sanguine 1, choleric 1, melancholic 1 and phlegmatic 1. The leading temperament is melancholic and the second is choleric. The table lists each factor with its position and its vote, so any one of them can be checked against an ephemeris, and names the factor that broke a tie if one was broken.

The texts described the choleric as quick to act and quick to anger, the sanguine as sociable and hopeful, the melancholic as careful, slow and inclined to solitude, and the phlegmatic as placid and slow to move. Those descriptions belong to the tradition and attach to the label, not to anyone. A different weighting, of the kind Greenbaum or Frawley uses, could change the leading temperament of this same chart.

Some outcomes are more common than others, and the lean is worth seeing before any single result is read. The table below comes from a sweep of daily charts across 1900 to 2050 years at three latitudes, each chart scored by the same code as the calculator. Over the whole sweep, sanguine takes 26.9% of the charts, choleric 27.7%, melancholic 25.6% and phlegmatic 19.8%.

Three of the five votes depend only on the date, and over a long sweep they come out close to even: the Sun's season spends about a quarter of the year on each pair, and the Moon's sign and phase run on their own clocks. The lean comes from the rising sign and, through it, from the ruler, because the rising sign is not spread evenly across the day once the birthplace is away from the equator.

At the equator the twelve signs rise in nearly equal time. Farther north, the signs from Cancer to Sagittarius, the signs of long ascension, take longer to cross the eastern horizon, and the signs from Capricorn to Gemini rise quickly, some in well under an hour. A chart cast at a high northern latitude therefore has a long-ascension sign rising more often than not, and the two votes tilt with it; south of the equator the groups swap. The site's study of rising signs by latitude sets out those times, and the three latitude rows of the table show the tilt in the shares.

None of this says anything about people. It says that the method, run over every day of a long span at a given latitude, lands on some labels more often than others, which is a property of the scoring and the geometry of the horizon. A result on the most common temperament for its latitude is unremarkable, and one on the least common is the product of the same arithmetic.

A temperament, as this page uses the word, is a label the method gives a chart. It is the outcome of five votes on five positions, and it changes if one vote is weighted or dropped. It is not a finding about the body of the person born under the chart, not a type the person belongs to, and not something the person has. Nothing in the tally touches the body at all; the inputs are degrees of longitude and an angle between two lights.

The humoral medicine the labels came from was a theory of its period. Galen's physiology was taught for well over a thousand years and then set aside as anatomy and chemistry replaced it. The astrological scoring that borrowed its vocabulary was never tested as medicine, and no study has shown that a chart scored this way says anything about a body. The site keeps the words because they are the names of the method, not because they describe anyone.

The character words are the tradition's, and the tradition is named wherever this page uses them. A reader who finds a result apt is reading the way the tradition read, and a reader who finds it wrong has found a limit of a five-vote method, which is the more useful finding.

What the method is for, on this site, is reading the texts with a chart open beside them: seeing how a seventeenth-century astrologer walked from five positions to one word, and how much of that walk rests on choices another author made differently. The notices at the top and foot of the page say the rest.