Free Temperament Calculator

The four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic) are Hellenistic personality types derived from the elemental balance in your birth chart. Each combines two qualities, hot or cold paired with wet or dry. Your dominant temperament is whichever pairing wins the count across your Ascendant, its ruler, the Sun, the Moon, and the strongest planet in your chart.

This is the chart-based Hellenistic method, not the self-report personality quiz of the same name. The terminology is shared because both descend from Galen, but the data sources differ. The chart shows the constitutional substrate; the quiz shows the learned behavior layered on top.

We use John Frawley's five-point method, the same one taught in The Real Astrology(2000) and used by working traditional astrologers. Frawley's argument is simple: temperament should reflect the vehicle, the basic constitutional material, and that vehicle is encoded in five chart factors.

• The Ascendant sign carries the primary qualities of the rising element.
• The Ascendant ruler by planetary nature (Saturn cold + dry, Mars hot + dry, Jupiter hot + wet, etc.).
• The Sun, whose qualities derive from the season at birth, not its own nature.
• The Moon by sign element, with the lunar phase quarter noted as a refinement (not weighted in v1).
• The Lord of the Geniture, the planet with the most accumulated dignity over the five hylegiacal points (the almuten figuris), read by its planetary nature.

We tally heat versus cold and wet versus dry across these five points. The dominant pair wins. Ties produce a two-temperament reading (sanguine-choleric, melancholic-phlegmatic, etc.), which is more common than a clean single-humour verdict.

What we don't compute: Lehman's expanded weighting (full lunar phase tables, planets aspecting the first house) and Lilly's seasonal subdivisions are deeper, more variable, and harder to display honestly without burying the verdict. For the dignity layer that decides the Lord of the Geniture, see the almuten figuris calculator.

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 metabolic register your body assumes 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 reads +4 hot and only +1 wet, the heat is the obvious headline; the dryness is the silent partner. The strongest quality, the one with the biggest delta, is usually where you overcorrect. The traditional remediation logic is simple: bring in the opposite quality through diet, environment, and pace.

Step 4, age and transits redistribute the balance. Galen treated temperament as fluid. Childhood was hot and wet (sanguine), adolescence hot and dry (choleric), adulthood cold and dry (melancholic), old age cold and wet (phlegmatic). A Saturn return, a hard Mars transit, or a long winter can pull a chart away from its native temperament for months. The calculator gives you the natal baseline; lived experience overlays it.

Most online temperament tools tally elements (fire, earth, air, water) and stop. That misses half the system. The four elements come from pairing the qualities, not the other way around. If you only count elements, you lose the diagnostic 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 verdict 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 Hellenistic version (what this calculator runs) derives your temperament from your birth data. No questionnaire, no self-report. Galen used it to prescribe medicine; Renaissance physicians used it to choose foods, exercise routines, and bloodletting schedules; modern traditional astrologers use it as the first move in any natal interpretation. 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 Galen but 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 elements (earth, water, air, fire), each defined by two of four qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry). Hippocrates' school, a generation later, mapped those four qualities onto four bodily fluids: blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm. Galen, writing around 175 CE, turned the humours into a clinical framework. Each humour produced a recognizable temperament, each temperament had typical illnesses, each illness had a counter-quality remedy. 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. The procedure survived the seventeenth-century collapse of humoural medicine because astrologers kept using it, and resurfaced in the late twentieth century through John Frawley, Lee Lehman, and Olivia Barclay. What you're computing here is the same calculation Lilly and Galen would recognize.

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: Aquarius. Hot + wet (air sign element).
2. Ascendant ruler: Saturn. Cold + dry by planetary nature.
3. Sun in Leo, summer (Northern Hemisphere). Hot + dry. Summer Sun in a fire sign.
4. Moon in Taurus, waxing crescent. Cold + dry by sign element. Phase noted as a refinement, not weighted in the tally.
5. Lord of the Geniture: Saturn, the planet with the most accumulated dignity across the five hylegiacal points (the almuten figuris). Cold + dry by nature.

Tally: three cold to two hot, four dry to one wet. The verdict is melancholic, with the dryness running strongest and a clear cold edge.

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.