Four Humors
The four humors are the traditional medical-astrological way of describing constitution through the qualities hot, cold, dry, and moist. In the local source base, they appear less as literal fluid theory and more as an interpretive language for temperament and bodily tendency. Morris presents them that way very directly, and Ptolemy supplies the planetary quality doctrine that underlies their use in astrology. (Morris, Cycles in Medical Astrology, Constitution, Cycles and Humors; Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, chs. 4-8)
The four temperaments
Morris gives the standard fourfold arrangement:
- sanguine as warm and moist
- choleric as hot and dry
- phlegmatic as cold and wet
- melancholic as cold and dry
He also treats the humors as a living constitutional framework rather than a single static label. A chart can show mixed conditions, and the practitioner is meant to look for confluence rather than forcing everything into one simple type.
Why astrology uses them
Ptolemy's opening chapters explain why astrology can participate in this framework. He assigns heating, moistening, drying, and cooling qualities to the planets, distinguishes benefic from malefic mixtures, and explains how sect and phase can alter expression. That gives astrologers a way to read temperament from a chart rather than from symptoms alone. (Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I, chs. 4-8)
In practice, the humoral language lets the astrologer describe patterns such as excess heat, dryness, coldness, or moisture, and then compare those with the person's presentation, season, and chart condition.
How the local medical text uses them
Morris explicitly warns by example that one does not judge constitution from only one sign or one planet. He looks for converging testimony. A person who easily gets cold, has a predominance of cold signs, and was born under coldening conditions shows a stronger cold pattern than a chart that is internally mixed. That emphasis on confluence is the most useful local corrective to oversimplified temperament writing. (Morris, Cycles in Medical Astrology, Introduction)
He also notes that humoral thinking is now often used qualitatively rather than literally. That is a helpful framing for this section: the four humors are best read here as a traditional constitutional model.
Practical use in this section
This page is a foundation for the rest of the medical-astrology set:
Those pages show how the humors are distributed through planets, signs, and anatomy.
A careful reading
The local sources support humoral doctrine strongly as part of traditional medical astrology, but they support it as a qualitative and constitutional language. That is the safest and clearest way to read the topic here.