Earth

Meaning

Earth is the element of Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn, the three signs that form a triangle of 120° around the zodiac. Astrologers read it as substance and patience: the body and the senses, work and resources, what can be touched, tested and built to last.

Earth takes a different shape in each of its signs. In Capricorn, cardinal, it organises and builds; in Taurus, fixed, it keeps, tends and lets things grow; in Virgo, mutable, it refines, sorts and adapts. A chart rich in earth tends to trust what it can verify, to think in terms of results and to keep going steadily; its gift is to make ideas real. Too much of it can turn into caution that never risks anything, or into a world measured only by what is useful.

A chart with little earth is not impractical by nature. Its sense of reality may simply come through other channels, and astrologers often look at Saturn, at the houses where the earth signs fall, and at the routines a person chooses to give their life a shape.

In practice

• Earth and its partner, water: each earth sign faces a water sign across the zodiac, and both are negative signs, receptive rather than outgoing. Water softens earth and earth holds water; the pair is read as form and feeling.
• Saturn, cold and dry in the old doctrine, is the planet most often called earthy; Venus and Mercury also rule earth signs, Taurus and Virgo.
• An earth Moon or an earth Ascendant weighs as much as an earth 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 prithvi, earth, and calls the houses of the same triangle, the 2nd, 6th and 10th, the houses of artha, of livelihood and the means to live.
• The Chinese five phases also have an Earth, tǔ, linked with the centre and with the turning points between the seasons; it is a phase of change among five, beside Wood, Fire, Metal and Water, and the two systems are best read side by side.

Origin and history

Empedocles, in the 5th century BC, counted earth among the four roots of all things, and Aristotle gave it the qualities cold and dry. 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 earthy temperament melancholic, and Lilly still described the earth signs as cold, dry and melancholic. In the 20th century, psychological astrology, Stephen Arroyo among others, linked earth with sensation, 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 earth 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 earth triplicity is ruled by Venus by day and the Moon by night, with Mars participating, after Dorotheus. The readings’ decans of each earth sign are the three earth signs in turn.

Correspondences