Air

Meaning

Air is the element of Gemini, Libra and Aquarius, the three signs that form a triangle of 120° around the zodiac. Astrologers read it as mind and connection: ideas, words and exchange, the ability to step back, compare and see how things relate.

Air takes a different shape in each of its signs. In Libra, cardinal, it reaches towards another person and seeks balance; in Aquarius, fixed, it holds to principles and to the group; in Gemini, mutable, it moves quickly from one question to the next. A chart rich in air tends to understand by talking and thinking things through; its gift is perspective, fairness and the art of linking people and ideas. Too much of it can live in the head, keep feelings at a distance or confuse a theory with an experience.

A chart with little air is not slow-witted. It may think in images, in feelings or through the hands rather than in words, and astrologers often look at Mercury and at the houses where the air signs fall to see how it reflects and communicates.

In practice

• Air and its partner, fire: each air sign faces a fire sign across the zodiac, and both are positive signs, outgoing rather than receptive. Air feeds fire; the pair is read as mind and spirit.
• Mercury, Venus and Saturn rule the air signs in traditional astrology, and Uranus Aquarius in modern astrology; Jupiter, warm and moist in the old doctrine, was called sanguine like the air signs, though it rules none of them.
• An air Moon or an air Ascendant weighs as much as an air Sun in most readings of balance: the element of needs and the element of first impressions.

Across traditions

• Jyotish groups the same three signs as vayu, air or wind, and calls the houses of the same triangle, the 3rd, 7th and 11th, the houses of kama, of desire and relationship.
• The Chinese five phases have no air: their five are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, and the nearest notion, qì, the breath that moves through all things, is not one of the phases. The two systems are best read side by side.

Origin and history

Empedocles, in the 5th century BC, counted air among the four roots of all things, and Aristotle gave it the qualities hot and moist. Astrologers of the Hellenistic and Roman world grouped the signs in four triangles, which came to be joined to the four elements; medieval medicine called the airy temperament sanguine, and Lilly still described the air signs as hot, moist and sanguine. In the 20th century, psychological astrology, Stephen Arroyo among others, linked air with thinking, one of the four functions of Carl Jung.

How Ulune calculates it

The chart’s first page counts the ten planets, from the Sun to Pluto, in air signs, and the table weighs every body, the Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant most, the outer planets least, leaving the angles out without a birth time. In the dignity table the air triplicity is ruled by Saturn by day and Mercury by night, with Jupiter participating, after Dorotheus. The readings’ decans of each air sign are the three air signs in turn, with Uranus, the modern ruler of Aquarius, over the Aquarius decans.

Correspondences