Free Temperament Calculator

The four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic) are constitutional types read from the balance of qualities in your birth chart. Each combines two qualities, hot or cold paired with wet or dry. Your dominant temperament is whichever pairing wins a weighted count across your Ascendant and its ruler, your Moon and its ruler, the Moon's phase, the season you were born into, and the planet with the most dignity at your Ascendant degree.

The chart method and the self-report personality quiz share their terminology because both descend from the Galenic humoral tradition, and their data sources differ. The chart shows the constitutional substrate; the quiz shows the learned behavior layered on top.

We use the seven factors and weights Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum published in Temperament: Astrology's Forgotten Key (2005, p. 89). Hers is the one modern temperament formula built from a documented study: she tested nine candidate chart factors against the temperaments Waldorf teachers had assigned to 35 of their pupils, and neither she nor the teachers saw the charts before the typing was done. The study is small, and she calls it anecdotal rather than statistical. The double weight on the Ascendant sign, the Moon sign, and the season is her judgement: she calls them her big three and found it reasonable to count them twice.

Seven factors, ten points on each axis:

• Ascendant sign by element, worth 2 points.
• Ascendant ruler by its own nature, worth 1 point (Saturn cold and dry, Mars hot and dry, Jupiter hot and wet, and so on).
• Almuten of the Ascendant by its own nature, worth 1 point: the planet with the most essential dignity at the Ascendant degree. It was the best single factor in her study, matching 23 of the 35 children.
• Moon sign by element, worth 2 points.
• The Moon's ruler by the element of the sign it occupies, worth 1 point. This one reads by placement rather than by nature, which is what separates it from the Ascendant-ruler factor.
• Moon phase by Lilly's quarters, worth 1 point: new to first quarter hot and wet, first quarter to full hot and dry, full to last quarter cold and dry, last quarter to new cold and wet. This one scored below her bar in the study and joined the formula after further experiment with Garry Phillipson.
• Season of birth by the Sun's sign, worth 2 points. Aries through Gemini is spring (hot and wet), Cancer through Virgo summer (hot and dry), Libra through Sagittarius autumn (cold and dry), Capricorn through Pisces winter (cold and wet). The equinox, not the first of the month, is where a season turns.

Heat is tallied against cold and wet against dry across all seven. The higher side takes each axis, and the surviving pair names the humour. Because the weights total ten per axis, a genuine 5-5 tie is reachable; when that happens the result says so instead of dressing a tie-break up as a verdict.

Two ways to count the same ten points. The axis tally is how every traditional author scored temperament, and it leads the result. Greenbaum herself moved to a second count: each factor goes whole to the one temperament its pair of qualities names. She switched after Garry Phillipson ran her own chart both ways and found it dead even on the axes, yet seven points phlegmatic and seven choleric by name. The axes let opposite temperaments cancel, and the name count keeps them in view. The result shows both, and the two pick a different leading temperament in roughly one chart in four.

Mercury and Venus are read by orientality. The other five planets keep a fixed nature, but Greenbaum found that the solar phase of Mercury or Venus seemed to track observed temperament whenever either one ruled the Ascendant. She adopted the rule after the study, so it was never scored against the 35 children. Oriental (rising before the Sun) both read hot and wet. Occidental, Mercury reads cold and dry and Venus cold and wet. Between them they rule four signs, so about a third of charts turn on this.

When the almuten is tied: two planets can hold equal dignity at the Ascendant degree. The first in Chaldean order takes the point, and the result names the tie and says whether the two planets would have scored differently. For the dignity scoring behind it, see the almuten figuris calculator.

What we don't compute: aspects to the significators, and planets sitting in the first house. Every earlier method weights planets in the first house, and most weight aspects too. Greenbaum leaves both out on the reasoning that they are accidental rather than essential, and belong to a second pass that reads manners on top of the constitution. We follow her formula as published, so they are absent here too.

Step 1, the dominant humour, is your default register. The winning temperament is the room you live in. The mood you snap back to after stress, the pace you take work at when no one is watching, the temperamental register you return to when nothing is pulling it elsewhere. This is not personality. It is constitution, the substrate that personality runs on.

Step 2, the secondary, is your shadow strategy. Almost no chart is a single temperament. Look at the second-place pairing. That is your access mode, the temperament you reach for when the dominant one fails. A choleric-phlegmatic alternates between push and stillness; a sanguine-melancholic runs hot socially then crashes into private rumination.

Step 3, the strongest single quality, is your blind spot. If your chart lands hot by 6 and wet by only 2, the heat is the obvious headline and the moisture is the silent partner. The strongest quality, the one with the biggest gap, is usually where you overcorrect. The traditional balancing logic is simple: read the opposite quality through rhythm, environment, and pace.

Step 4, age and transits lay overlays on the balance. The classical ages of man give each stage of life its own quality: childhood hot and wet (sanguine), youth hot and dry (choleric), adulthood cold and dry (melancholic), old age cold and wet (phlegmatic). Greenbaum is firm that these color the constitution rather than replace it; in her words, “what we get is what we keep.” A Saturn return, a hard Mars transit, or a long winter can change how the temperament shows for months. The calculator gives you the constitution those overlays sit on.

Most astrology apps show an element count (fire, earth, air, water) and stop there. Greenbaum measured how well that works as a temperament reading. Scored against the same 35 children her formula was built on, a standard weighted element count named the right temperament for 9 of them, about one in four. The four elements come from pairing the qualities, so counting elements alone loses the information that lives in the qualities themselves.

Two charts can both read "earth-dominant" and have very different temperamental profiles. One might be cold and dry across the board (true melancholic). Another might be cold and dry on the elements but show a hot-and-wet streak through the chart ruler and Moon (a melancholic on paper, sanguine in the room).

Quality balance also tells you about modality, the cardinal/fixed/mutable axis. Cardinal signs initiate, fixed signs hold, mutable signs adapt. A chart loaded with cardinal placements reads as restless even if the elemental balance suggests stability. The temperamental result is the elements' headline; the quality and modality balances are the body copy.

No, it isn't. The four-temperaments terminology is shared, but the lineage forks in two different places.

The chart-based version (what this calculator runs) derives your temperament from your birth data. No questionnaire, no self-report. Historically, physicians who practiced astrological medicine used it before prescribing, Renaissance physicians used it to choose foods, exercise routines, and bloodletting schedules, and traditional astrologers today use it as the first move in a natal interpretation. This page preserves that history without making medical recommendations. The data point is your chart, not your self-image.

The self-report personality version (Catholic spiritual direction, Keirsey, OpenPsychometrics) asks you a series of questions about your behavior and tallies your answers. The terminology was inherited from the Galenic tradition, and the methodology is closer to a Big Five inventory than to medical astrology. If that's what you came here for, OpenPsychometrics' free OSPP test is a good place to start.

The two methods often agree, especially on the dominant temperament. They diverge on the secondary, and they diverge sharply on people whose self-image differs from their constitutional baseline. Someone raised in a high-melancholic environment can answer a quiz like a melancholic while running a sanguine chart.

Empedocles, around 450 BCE, proposed that everything is made of four roots: earth, water, air, fire. Aristotle supplied the part that matters here, defining each element by a pair drawn from hot, cold, wet, and dry (On Generation and CorruptionII.3). Hippocrates' school mapped four bodily fluids onto the same scheme: blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm. Galen, writing around 175 CE, turned the humours into a clinical framework of graded mixtures of hot, cold, wet, and dry, each with its illness patterns and its counter-quality remedy. The four named types, sanguine through phlegmatic, are a later medieval fixing of those mixtures into a typology. The system held for fifteen hundred years.

It entered astrology through medical practice. Working physicians cast natal charts to estimate constitutional temperament before prescribing treatment, on the reasoning that the same disease in two different bodies needs two different cures. William Lilly's Christian Astrology(1647) preserves the calculation method in its mature form, along with a useful warning: his own arithmetic called his worked example sanguine, and three pages later he describes the man as a melancholic. The procedure survived the collapse of humoural medicine because astrologers kept using it, and returned in the late twentieth century through Olivia Barclay, Lee Lehman, and John Frawley. Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum then tested the chart factors against observed temperaments and published the weighted formula this calculator uses. On Lilly's native it returns melancholic.

Carl Jung was born July 26, 1875, at 7:32 PM, in Kesswil, Switzerland (Rodden Rating AA). Jung's introverted, brooding, prolific, slow-to-publish constitution is part of the public record, and his own self-typing as introverted intuitive thinking gives us a reality check.

1. Ascendant in Aquarius, 2 points. Air, so hot and wet.
2. Ascendant ruler Saturn, 1 point. Cold and dry by nature.
3. Almuten of the Ascendant Saturn, 1 point. Cold and dry again; one planet holding two roles doubles its weight, which is how the tradition has always handled it. Saturn shares this one with Mercury (see the wrinkle below).
4. Moon in Taurus, 2 points. Earth, so cold and dry.
5. Venus, which rules Taurus, sits in Cancer, 1 point. This factor reads the sign Venus occupies rather than Venus itself, so it scores water: cold and wet.
6. Moon in the fourth quarter, 1 point. The Moon sits 282 degrees past the Sun, twelve past the exact last quarter, and the fourth quarter of the cycle is cold and wet.
7. Sun in Leo, so summer, 2 points. Hot and dry.

Tally: cold 6 to hot 4, dry 6 to wet 4. The result is melancholic, with a choleric secondary. Both axes land 6-4, which the calculator flags: choleric wins the second slot on heat, and phlegmatic has an equally good claim on moisture.

Counted by name, the way Greenbaum scored her own charts, the same ten points come to melancholic 4, with sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric at 2 each. Both counts crown melancholic. Underneath, the name count is flatter: no single runner-up, and every temperament present.

This matches the man. Jung was famously slow, deep, introverted, given to long brooding cycles, preoccupied with depth psychology, the literal study of the cold-and-dry interior. The temperament reading does not explain Jung's mind, but it sets the stage on which the mind played out.

One honest wrinkle. Jung was born about four minutes before sunset, so whether his is a day chart or a night chart depends on which historical clock you use for 1875 Switzerland. Our engine uses Bern Mean Time, which puts the Sun a third of a degree below the horizon and makes it a night chart; software that uses Kesswil local mean time puts it barely above and calls it a day chart. Sect decides who takes the air triplicity at the Ascendant degree. As a night chart, Mercury takes it and ties Saturn at 5 dignity points, and Saturn wins the tie by Chaldean order. As a day chart, Saturn takes it and wins outright. Saturn gets the point either way, so the verdict holds, but at night the tie is live: Mercury is oriental in this chart, so hot and wet, and handing it the point would bring the heat axis to an even 5-5.