Temperament

TEM-per-uh-muhnt

Definition

Temperament is the old idea that your basic disposition comes from the balance of four humors — sanguine (warm and moist), choleric (hot and dry), melancholic (cold and dry), and phlegmatic (cold and moist). Each humor was thought to sit in a bodily fluid — blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm — and each lines up with an element and a planetary lineage. Used as a philosophical lens, temperament frames the chart as a symbolic picture of the mix you were born with.

In Tradition

Across the Hellenistic-Latin and medieval traditions, temperament is the hinge that joins astrology to natural philosophy and medicine. The chart is read for which qualities — hot, cold, wet, dry — come out on top. The Ascendant, its ruler, the season of birth, the Moon, and any angular planets together leave a kind of humoral fingerprint that describes a lasting make-up of body and mind rather than predicting separate events.

In Practice

To work out temperament, an astrologer tallies the elemental and qualitative testimony of the Ascendant ruler, the Moon, the Sun, and any planet sitting on an angle — weighting the season of birth and whether the Sun rises before it. The strongest element-and-quality combination gives the primary type; mixed and shifted types are common, such as sanguine-choleric or melancholic-phlegmatic. The result describes overall constitution, not specific forecasts, and it has long supported medical-astrology diagnosis, the timing of elections around humoral remedies, and plain constitutional descriptions of someone's pace, appetite, sleep pattern, and emotional register.

Historical Origin

The four-humor doctrine traces to the Hippocratic corpus and was woven into astrological practice through Galen and Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos III. Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647, public domain) preserves the classical English calculation using the Ascendant, its ruler, the Moon, and angular planets. The technique carried into the modern revival through Houlding and other traditional-revival practitioners.

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From temperamentum, "a mixing in due proportion," from temperare, "to mix, moderate".

Further Reading