Which Astrology Element Are You?

How Fire, Earth, Air and Water Types Reveal Themselves

IN APRIL THE SUN ENTERS TAURUS - AN EARTH SIGN. Feet on the ground. Gardening time. It’s Spring in America and Britain - Autumn in Australia and New Zealand. Either season is about walking or hiking.

Astrology does not have to be complicated. The Sun goes into Taurus in the final week of April and people start thinking about what is practical. The other earth signs are Capricorn (career) and Virgo (health).

You have to eat fruit and vegetables to be healthy. They have to be grown or paid for. Back to Taurus. The more successful you are in your career (Capricorn) the more you can pay for a doctor (Virgo). Round and round the earth signs go. They trine each other.

Then, everything changes in the final week of May when the Sun goes into Gemini, an air sign. What do you do, when your basic needs are taken care of? You talk about ideas instead of peaches and beans, dollars and cents.

Do You Know Your Dominant Elements?

A modern astrology chart with all the asteroids will show you. There are 34 factors in a 21st century natal horoscope. Add up the dominant two or three signs (mostly Taurus, Gemini, Cancer and so on) and decode the elements.

Aries, Leo and Sagittarius are fire.
Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn are earth.
Gemini, Libra and Aquarius are air.
Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces are water.

You can pick up your full modern natal chart for a one-month subscription to my website for US $7.

YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO LOOK SOME PEOPLE UP, OF COURSE. Extremely earthy people are plodding, sensible, often dull, successful, grounded, healthy, hard-working, reliable. They are Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn dominant. Method and order, method and order. They’re predictable.

Elements do what you would expect. Fire dominant people like starting things. Match to a flame to a bonfire night. People warm to them or find them too hot to handle - they get scorched, burned. Fire is immediate. Instant gratification. Aries starts a battle or wins a war in an hour. Leo starts a sexual relationship or a baby in ten minutes. Sagittarius is in America, but then France, same day. People get excited about fire dominant types.

ANY FOUR-PIECE BAND IS A GUIDE TO THE ELEMENTS. The lead singer is a fire type. He or she starts the gig. People draw close to the stage, as if it were a camp fire. The drummer is an earth type. He or she grounds the melody. The guitarist leads the musical conversation with riffs that sound like somebody speaking, talks to the lead singer (Paul and John, chit-chat) and often writes the songs - air type. The bass player feels his or her way into the music. Sad songs are bass driven. The vibrating bass is - vibes.

AIR SIGNS TALK, TALK, TALK OR WRITE, WRITE, WRITE so Substack is a home for airy types. Gemini, Libra, Aquarius dominant. Journalists, lawyers and social media residents are typical. Theories, concepts, ideas, debates. Gossip and chatter. Not necessarily, delivery of anything useful or sensible.

Just like air, airy types are here today, gone tomorrow. Light and breezy, cool and easy. Seinfeld is an air sign show. No hugging, no crying. It’s still funny. Twitter is air. The change in seasons from Taurus (earth) season to Gemini (air) season is nicely shown by this ancient issue of Harper’s Bazaar. There are the Twitter birds. Air sign types fly off, land, fly off, repeat. They tweet.

WATER SIGN DOMINANT PEOPLE are mostly Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces. The body fluid signs. Cancer is breast milk. Mother’s milk. Scorpio is semen. Scorpio rules sex. Pisces is tears - salty tears - like the ocean, where the fish dwell. Watery types feel all the feelings, very deeply.

Again, you don’t even need a chart to spot water dominant types. They emerge from the cinema with puffy, red faces - sniffing at the end of the film. They are irrational. They feel everything. They don’t know it, or understand it, or read about it, or take ideological positions regarding it. Their emotions tell them what is true. Watery types become sexually obsessive and fall in love with bad people. They don’t care. They respond to poetry and alcohol. To their mother, for better or worse.

All these extreme element types are reductive astrology, of course. You are not one type. There are not four kinds of people in the world. Figuring out elements is useful, though, as a rapid way into a question.

You can handle people better if you know their dominant element and better still, their stellium. Four, five, six or more factors in one sign is a stellium. Did you marry a Virgo stellium man? Don’t muck around with his daily routine.

Is blood thicker than water? That person is watery. An airy type will tell them their family is dysfunctional and suggest a book to read. The water type doesn’t get it. They don’t feel heard. This drives the air type mad. They repeat the solution, which they heard on a TED talk. The watery person shakes her head. “I have to go back for Dad’s birthday. You don’t understand.”

ANY REACTION TO THE TITANIC SHOWS A DOMINANT ELEMENT. If you cry helplessly, wonder what God’s plan was for the ship, put yourself in the shoes of parted lovers (and parted mothers and children) - you are watery. If you saw the film, you don’t really recover. Kate and Leo spoke to you.

Action-stations response? You’re fiery. So, you want to lead the attack on the apparent culprits, like the Titanic captain, or the California captain, or J.P.Morgan and his lack of lifeboats - and start a revolution in shipping safety measures and get up and launch the next ship already - you’re fiery.

If your main concern is the material used to build Titanic, the size of the iceberg, the inexplicable lack of spare binoculars on board, the valuables sunk below the wreck, the insurance claims, the failure of the captain to organise a lifeboat drill before the sinking - you’re earthy.

If you want to discuss the disparity between rich and poor travellers on board, the ethics of ‘women and children first’, the need for a Morse code emergency procedure - you’re airy. You need to argue the point about the way the class system is applied to cruise ships anyway. (And you would still have been analysing this as the Titanic sank, never mind the lifeboats).

HERE ARE SOME COMMON OUTCOMES WITH ELEMENT TYPES. Airy types don’t respond to earthy types. So: I am renting a house in Sydney this week which is owned by an airhead. I am quite earthy. It’s not working.

The lock box does not function, so you can’t get in. The code was not emailed or texted to me so I could not even operate the lock box. There was no milk.

But - there is a marvellous book on Grace Cossington and stunning French windows to let all the air in. An aromatherapy burner. Classic airhead host.

You can have lots of fun with this. You can also understand why some relationships and friendships never work. The fiery type who just wants to get started with renovations (like a match to a barbecue) who is bored by the earthy type who worries about the cost and wants to get six quotes.

You can also understand the inner conflicts you have. If you are dominated by water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) and just want to have a baby with the person you just fell madly in love with - then your airy side (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) will get you over-thinking this until the head miles destroy all desire.

IT’S TRUE THAT ELEMENT TYPES GET ON. Air and air, for example. It is also true that (as you might expect) fire and air types get on; water and earth types get on. This is basic stuff in astrology, but you need both full charts.

It’s also true that the Sun Sign can be really misleading, as to the sort of person you are dealing with. People who are Gemini Sun can present as water types who are Roman Catholics who have affairs and cry a lot in the confessional. Not so Gemini. They’re basically fake Cancerians or Scorpios.

If you’d like to go further with this elementary side of astrology, I launched an element-based NFT range with Anita Bacic and Tintin Cooper which comes with complimentary access to four element-based Zoom talks in 2023. Here it is.

https://www.elementalsnfts.com