The Elements, Again

I get a lot of criticism of how I assign the elements. "But air is intellect! How can you be so intellectual if you have no air?" That kind of thing. I get frustrated with this: in my experience, the popular assignment of elements—fire is action, air is intellect, water is emotion, earth is structure—works in neither the forms of astrology I've studied nor in geomancy. As an example, my natal chart is mostly water, and so occult-type people tend assume I'm very emotional; but in fact it's the opposite, and most people who know me tend to consider me "cold" or "robotic."

Instead, the assessment of the elements that I've found to work is this:

• Fire is creative. A purely fiery person might be an artist, a musician, a designer.

• Air is social. A purely airy person might be a partier, a socialite, someone who likes to communicate.

• Water is reflective. A purely watery person might be a hermit, a contemplative.

• Earth is practical. A purely earthy person might be a manual laborer, a farmer, somebody who does handicrafts, a salt-of-the-earth kind of person.

From this, you can see that there are two sorts of axes being defined:

• Fire and air are masculine, they express; while water and earth are feminine and receive.

• Fire and water are "inner," they're abstract, impractical; while air and earth are "outer," they're grounded in the physical world and actually make changes to it.

In my opinion, all of them have an intellectual capacity of a sort: fire generates ideas, air communicates ideas, water refines ideas, and earth carries out ideas. Each, however, is very limited and has severe disadvantages on its own—for example, far from being an "intellectual," I would normally consider an airy person to be a dilettante, someone who goes broad but not deep.

Normally one needs multiple elements to balance out, though some of these balance better than others. For example, besides water, my only other halfway solid element is fire: this helps keep me from being fixated on constantly retreading the same ground (since instead of just reflecting on the same things over and over, I have an inner wellspring of new things to reflect on), but on the other hand it does nothing whatsoever to help me be practical (since fire and water are both "inner" elements).