Temperaments

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A temperament entry records one of the four Galenic humoral types, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine, a documented medical theory of the body attributed to the physician Galen that assigns each temperament a governing bodily fluid, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood, and a paired hot, cold, wet or dry complexion, long before any astrological reading was layered onto that original medical scheme.

An entry records a temperament's documented governing humor and its complexion within Galen's own medical framework first, since the humoral theory itself is a documented ancient theory of physiology and disposition that predates and stands independent of its later astrological use, and only then records the specific planet later astrological tradition pairs with it.

An entry keeps this ancient medical theory honestly distinct from any claim of modern clinical validity, since Galenic humoral medicine is a documented historical system of thought, influential for many centuries, not a theory current medicine accepts, and an entry that presented it as settled fact rather than as a historical intellectual tradition would misstate what kind of claim it actually is.

An entry also records the season Galenic tradition pairs with a temperament, since the medical scheme itself already linked each humor to a time of year before any astrological planet was added to that pairing.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William Lilly's 1647 astrological textbook pairs each of the four Galenic temperaments with a specific planet, Mars for choleric, Saturn for melancholic, the Moon for phlegmatic and Jupiter for sanguine, giving a documented working example of how a practicing seventeenth century astrologer actually applied the older medical humoral theory to chart reading rather than treating the two systems as separate.

That documented pairing matters for a temperament entry because the specific planetary assignment is not part of Galen's own original medical theory, it is a later addition astrological practice layered onto it, and Lilly's text lets an entry record honestly which part of a temperament's meaning traces to the ancient medical source and which part entered through this later astrological synthesis.

An entry therefore uses Lilly's own textbook for the documented planetary pairing and its stated seasonal and elemental reasoning, fire and summer for choleric, earth and autumn for melancholic, water and winter for phlegmatic, air and spring for sanguine, while keeping the humoral theory's own medical origin sourced to the earlier Galenic material it actually comes from.

An entry states this planetary layer as Lilly's own documented seventeenth century synthesis, never as part of Galen's original medical claim, since keeping the two authorship layers separate is what lets a reader trust either one on its own terms.