John Frawley_ Frawley_ (https://www.facebook.com/johnfrawley (https://www.facebook.com/johnfrawley)) , on temperament:
‘When you first started reading about astrology, dear boy, I expect you began with books on sun signs. Am I right ?’ ‘Yes, uncle.’ ‘And what was your next step ?’ I raked through my memory. ‘Books telling me about the planets, I suppose. You know, “Mars in Libra means means this” and “Venus “Venus square square Saturn means that” that”
all the basic stuff stuff.’ He
laughed, loud and long, so his face turned red and tears came to his eyes. ‘Oh, my boy,’ he gasped, as he regained his composure, ‘you really should go on the stage. You call that “basic stuff” ? Thank goodness youdidn't begin with anything advanced!’ His own comment restarted his laughter. ‘That is, I know, the usual line of approach; but it is approaching the subject from completely the wrong end. Now, you see that delicious Christmas cake your aunt has baked?’ I did, and I knew him well enough to know that his enquiry was not aimed solely at checking my eyesight.
I
fetched
him
a
piece.
He held it up before me, pointing at the icing. ‘This, my boy, is the equivalent of “Mars in Libra means this”. And this,’ he pointed at a little model snowman standing on top of the icing, ‘is the equivalent of “Venus square Saturn means that”. Now the icing on this piece of cake is very nice. Mmm, very nice indeed, actually - your dear aunt has excelled herself. And this model snowman is rather cute and adds to the festive effect. But look at the amount of cake there is beneat beneath h them. them. Don’t Don’t you think think we should should pay some some attent attention ion to that?’ that?’
He
did, did,
with with
relish. ‘There is flour and sugar and eggs, lots of eggs, and dried fruit of all varieties and Guinness and brandy and all sorts in this cake. Without all that, the icing would be an overly sugary morsel. Are you ever served pieces of icing without there being a cake?’ I shook my head. ‘You might say the cake provides the context within which the icing makes sense. No cake; no context. So it is with the n atal chart.’ ‘You’ve ‘You’ve told me about the external external context, uncle. uncle. Are you talking about the internal context now?’ ‘Exactly. ‘Exactly. We must start by considering the cake before we get around to considering the icing. Only once we know about the cake does the icing make any kind of sense. We would not, for instance, put this kind of icing on a rum b aba or a chocolate eclair, would we?’ I was wondering if he would ever get back to astrology, or if we would spend the rest of the evening discussing my aunt’s Christmas cake. ‘Do be so kind as to pass me that pen, dear boy.’ He took a serviette and drew on it. ‘Our reading of the birth chart is shaped like a pyramid, built up of several layers. As you have found, the usual approach to natal astrology in the modern world, when you’re picking up a book in a bookshop to read about how fascinating you are and why, is to start at the very top
of this pyramid. It’s like starting with the little model snowman. It makes far better sense to start at the bottom, because what is at the top cannot be understood without an understanding of what is at the bottom. ‘Each layer of this pyramid provides the context within which everything above it must be understood. Each layer of the pyramid amplifies and makes more specific what we have learned from the layers below. And look: it’s a pyramid, not some strange construction of modern art. The top is directly above the bottom, not over to one side or floating in space somewhere, detached from everything else. That’s because the person is integral, the person is one, so all the bits fit together, albeit not usually harmoniously.’ I had to admit that his pyramid drawing made sense, though I had a worrying feeling that reading the chart from bottom up like this would involve a good deal of laborious work before I got to the little bits at the top, which were what gave me the tidbits of information about myself that I so treasured. ‘The first layer of the pyramid that we need to deal with is the layer of the temperament. There are layers below that, layers that I haven’t put on the diagram - the foundations, if you like - but we don’t need to bother with them. We could explain to the client that he is a warm-blooded biped. This is indeed extremely important information; but if he is in any doubt about it, an astrological consultation is probably not what he needs. We can take these very low layers for granted. The basis for our judgement is the temperament. This because the temperament forms the basis for what we are. It is like the fabric from which the garment of what we are is made. ‘Consider: if you buy a garment it will be made out of a certain fabric. That fabric will never change. You may alter it, have it taken up or let out, or dye it a different colour. But if it is silk it will always be silk; if wool, always wool. If we take a woollen garment, we can unpick it and knit it up again, but it will still be made of wool. So it is with our temperament: we’re stuck with it. There’s nothing we can do to fundamentally change it. It can be moderated or muted over time, and we can learn to live with it, but we cannot change it. For example, all temperaments will gradually cool over time, because this is the nature of life: it gets cooler as life goes on. Old age is cold, ruled by Saturn. But this does not change a person’s temperament in its essence. A fiery temperament will not become an earthy one; it will become a cooler kind of fire. ‘But I’m jumping ahead. I’m telling you to start at the beginning in your natal judgements, so I should start at the beginning in my explanations.’ He began drawing on his serviette again. ‘With the temperament, we are going right back to the basic building-blocks of Creation: the hot, cold, moist, and dry from which we and everything else in the created world is made. Creation began with the initial fiat: Let there be light_. This was, of course, hot and dry. As this creative impulse falls away from the Divine ‘falls away’ in a loose sense, of course - it becomes cooler. It cools, so becoming the cold and
dry that is matter. Remember what Dante shows us. The centre of hell, which is in the very depths of Creation, as far from the Divine as it is possible to be, is utterly cold. Satan is there, encased in ice, not at all the hot chilli pepper that we think of as the Devil. ‘So we’ve got the hot/dry, which is fire, and we’ve got the cold/dry, which is earth. But the heat of the Divine is still shining down upon the cold/dry earth. The cold and dry of matter is not merely created and abandoned to its fate !
This warmth draws moisture out of the
dryness, so we now have the cold/moist, the watery element. You remember Hamlet’s plea,_Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew. This is what he is talking about. When explaining the way moisture is created from the cold/dry, the ancients would endlessly repeat the image of taking something cold and dry and leaving it outside over-night. Come back in the morning and you’ll find it covered in moisture. I suspect that explanation was about as convincing then as it is now.’ I had to agree. ‘For a start, the moisture that is deposited on this cold/dry thing isn’t drawn out of the thing itself, but out of the air. This is palpable. It is quite different to watching a piece of wood catch fire, where one can easily believe that the fire resides within the wood and is conjured into action. The true explanation is rather more interesting. The watery element is all about desire. Don’t worry, I’ll explain more about that in a minute. Just take it as read for now. So the Divine radiance is looking down upon the cold/dry, in all its lumpen inertia. This action creates the water of desire: the desire to move this lumpen matter back towards the Divine.’ ‘Oh, I know, uncle! It’s like I’ve heard in church, about having to pray for the desire to pray.’ ‘Indeed: that desire must be created by God. It is most appropriate that we are discussing this at Christmas, the great moment of the Divine reaching down into the lumpen inertia of matter. ‘Anyway, this isn’t the time for a lengthy discussion of cosmology. You’re eager to get on to reading the chart.’ I was relieved to hear that the old man still remembered. ‘Finally, we have the warmth of the Divine radiance continuing to shine upon the cold/moist. This warmth makes it hot and moist. It becomes air, and rises up towards the heavens.’ ‘Just like in the water cycle, where the warmth of the Sun lifts the water into the sky, turning
it
into
air.’
‘Just like. So, we now have our four elements: fire, earth, water, and air. We are all made up of these four elements. But you’ve seen with your aunt’s cooking: she can take four ingredients - flour, eggs, butter, and sugar - and produce many different things from them. What comes out of the oven depends on the proportions of each ingredient and the order in which they go into the bowl. In the same way, these four elements mix together in different ways to produce different kinds of people. ‘Temperament means, literally, mixture. My temperament is the kind of mix of elements
I have; your temperament is the mix you have. Are we primarily earthy, airy, fiery, or watery?’ ‘So we’re dividing humanity up into four types, uncle ?’ ‘At base, yes, although in practice it is a little more complex than that. Many people do not fall neatly into one type, but combine two.’
