Fire

Meaning

Fire is the element of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, the three signs that form a triangle of 120° around the zodiac. Astrologers read it as warmth and will: enthusiasm, courage, confidence, the urge to act, to create and to be seen.

Fire takes a different shape in each of its signs. In Aries, cardinal, it is the spark that starts things; in Leo, fixed, a steady flame that keeps a heart warm; in Sagittarius, mutable, a fire that travels and spreads its light. A chart rich in fire tends to act on inspiration and to trust that the way will open; its gift is to get things moving and to lift others with it. Too much of it can burn out, outrun its resources or forget the people who go more slowly.

A chart with little fire is not cold. Its warmth may simply be quieter, slower to declare itself, and astrologers often look at how the person finds courage elsewhere: through a strong Sun or Mars, or through the houses that fire signs fall in.

In practice

• Fire and its partner, air: each fire sign faces an air sign across the zodiac, and both are positive signs, outgoing rather than receptive. Air feeds fire; the pair is read as spirit and mind.
• The Sun, Mars and Jupiter are often called fiery planets in modern practice, after the fire signs they rule; traditional astrology gives Jupiter a warm and moist nature instead.
• A fire Moon or a fire Ascendant weighs as much as a fire 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 agni, fire, and calls the houses of the same triangle, the 1st, 5th and 9th, the houses of dharma, of purpose and right action.
• The Chinese five phases also have a Fire, huǒ, linked with summer and the south, but it is a phase of change among five, with Wood, Earth, Metal and Water, not one of four elements of matter, and the two systems are best read side by side.

Origin and history

The four elements come from Greek philosophy: Empedocles, in the 5th century BC, named fire, air, water and earth as the four roots of all things, and Aristotle gave each two qualities, fire being hot 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 fiery temperament choleric, and Lilly still described the fire signs as hot, dry and choleric. In the 20th century, psychological astrology, Stephen Arroyo among others, linked fire with intuition, 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 fire signs. The table weighs every body: the Sun, the Moon and the Ascendant count three, Mercury, Venus, Mars and the Midheaven two, Jupiter, Saturn, the Descendant and the IC one, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto a half; without a birth time the angles are left out. In the dignity table the fire triplicity is ruled by the Sun by day and Jupiter by night, with Saturn participating, after Dorotheus. The readings’ decans of each fire sign are the three fire signs in turn.

Correspondences