Water

Meaning

Water is the element of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, the three signs that form a triangle of 120° around the zodiac. Astrologers read it as feeling and attachment: emotion, memory, empathy, intuition, and the bonds that hold people together.

Water takes a different shape in each of its signs. In Cancer, cardinal, it moves to protect and to care; in Scorpio, fixed, it runs deep, holds fast and transforms; in Pisces, mutable, it dissolves edges and feels with everyone. A chart rich in water tends to sense a mood before anything is said and to decide by what feels right; its gift is compassion, loyalty and imaginative depth. Too much of it can be flooded by feeling, take on other people’s moods or hold on to old hurts.

A chart with little water is not unfeeling. Its feelings may be expressed through acts, ideas or loyalty rather than shown, and astrologers often look at the Moon and at the houses where the water signs fall to see where that sensitivity lives.

In practice

• Water and its partner, earth: each water sign faces an earth sign across the zodiac, and both are negative signs, receptive rather than outgoing. Earth holds water and water softens earth; the pair is read as feeling and form.
• The Moon and Venus, cold and moist in the old doctrine, were the watery planets of tradition; in modern astrology Neptune and Pluto, rulers of Pisces and Scorpio, join them.
• A water Moon or a water Ascendant weighs as much as a water 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 jala, water, and calls the houses of the same triangle, the 4th, 8th and 12th, the houses of moksha, of release and liberation.
• The Chinese five phases also have a Water, shuǐ, linked with winter and the north; it is a phase of change among five, beside Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal, and the two systems are best read side by side.

Origin and history

Empedocles, in the 5th century BC, counted water among the four roots of all things, and Aristotle gave it the qualities cold 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 watery temperament phlegmatic, and Lilly still described the water signs as cold, moist and phlegmatic. Astrologers have long disagreed on who rules this triangle: Dorotheus gives Venus by day, Mars by night and the Moon participating, while Lilly’s table gives Mars by day and by night. In the 20th century, psychological astrology, Stephen Arroyo among others, linked water with feeling, 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 water 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 Ulune follows Dorotheus: the water triplicity is ruled by Venus by day and Mars by night, with the Moon participating. The readings’ decans of each water sign are the three water signs in turn, with Pluto and Neptune, the modern rulers, over the Scorpio and Pisces decans.

Correspondences