Fire

The Element of Fire

We can accept the unpleasant more readily

than we can the inconsequential.

GOETHE



The cycle of the zodiac begins with fire, the gift which Prometheus stole from the gods to give to man so that he might have hope and a possibility of growth and development. And if we are to make any sense of those peculiar fire signs - Aries, Leo and Sagittarius - and their often incomprehensible but always dramatic behaviour in life and in relationships, we must, as with all the zodiacal symbolism, think for a moment about fire itself. With all the myriad forms that fire can take we can make two general comments about it. Firstly, it brings light into darkness. Secondly, it cannot be contained in one shape, one size, one form. It is volatile, unpredictable. So, too, with those people who belong to the astrological element of fire.

You may see some common descriptions of any fire sign in any good astrological textbook, or more reputable newspaper columns: warm, outgoing, self-centred, dramatic, lucky. The fire signs seem to have it all over the others in terms of sheer chutzpah. No one can quite top an Aries for daring; no one can beat a Leo for personality and impact; no one can come miles within a Sagittarian for a roving, adventurer's eye. But what really makes fire people tick? All those lovely descriptions are not much use if you happen to be in a relationship with a fiery temperament and are subjected to the more exaggerated idiosyncrasies of fiery behaviour. What does life really look like through fiery eyes, and what do they really need from a lover, a partner, a friend?

One key thought which might help: to the fire signs, life is an endless sea of possibilities. As long as there are opportunities to explore, open doors through which to pass, new twists and turns in a future that is still in formation and in which anything might happen, then the fiery type will be reasonably content - if contentment is a word one can apply to this restless, volatile psyche. But as soon as you take away the possibilities, close the doors, plan the future too rigidly, and remove that little bit of chaos that makes the world go round, then the fiery type panics. You have taken the very thing which nourishes them - their ability to shape creative things out of random possibilities. And as soon as you've done that you've lost them. Some people need security more than anything in the world. Not so the fire signs. While they like a little, too much of it is like burying them in clay. They suffocate.

Never mind talking to them about reality and responsibility. They see it perfectly clearly, thank you very much. It's just that this isn't their reality. The 'real' world to a fire signs is secretly that fantasy world which was suppose to end when the last fairy tale book was tucked away in he cupboard and the brutal truth about Santa Claus was made known. Look into the secret reality of the fire signs and you are in a world of pure romance, pure myth. Fire signs need to mythologize everything: other people, professions, situations, themselves. For fire, all the world's a stage, and no one plays the part with such panache.

You may have met that common-fire sign propensity to make vast Himalayan peaks out of perfectly ordinary molehills. It wasn't just a little disagreement, it was a Holocaust. It wasn't a nice film, it was Wonderful, Brilliant, Mind-Shattering. The overwhelming and contagious enthusiasm of the fire signs is hard to resist; so, too, is their anger. Fire signs often exaggerate their behaviour, dramatize it - even when they are alone. They aren't just spoiled brats trying to attract your attention. They need this fantasizing, this injection of brilliant colour and sound into the grey and banal fabric of what the world is constantly insisting is reality. Fire is not interested in the pragmatic approach to life. Take away a fire sign's fantasies and visions of how life might be, and you have crippled them. It is, truly, that serious. If there's one thing sacred to the fire signs, it is their dreams.

You may find the fiery types somewhat egocentric and insensitive. In some respects, they are - as regards the details of earthly reality. But it isn't really insensitivity. It's just that forcing a fire sign to focus his broad and all-encompassing vision on something so temporal and boring as a fact is positively threatening to him. If he stares at a detail for too long he feels that he might miss something. Fiery people like to get the gist of the picture without getting trapped in it for too long, so that they can take their sensitive, colourful impressions and place them in context with all those other impressions they're collecting about life. This is why so many fire signs are ardent and restless travelers. They like to get a taste of the world, of life, of current events, of cultures, of people.

The future is the most fascinating thing on earth to a fire sign. The past is a novel someone else wrote, the present relevant only as a potential doorway into a whole network of possible futures. When confronted with the incessant and monotonous demands of the material world, the fiery type may often drop the situation like the proverbial hot potato and move elsewhere. This has earned them the accusation of irresponsibility or callousness. Not so. It's just that they cannot bear to be imprisoned.

A few more significant comments about the fire signs, before we look at them individually. It is best that you get a clear picture of the type, for they are less likely than their earth, water or air relatives to be able to explain themselves to you. After all, knights on white horses never have to offer explanations in the fairy tales.

There is that wonderful gift that some fiery people have for the magic 'hunch'. Have you ever watched a fire sign assess a situation? They will rarely analyse the components, or if they do, it will be in an afterword, to justify themselves to some pestering earth sign who doesn't believe in hunches. But the fiery type seems to be able to get an instantaneous perception of all the undercurrents going on, and to come to a snap conclusion which just seems to 'happen' in their head. They rarely know how or why. They have an excellent nose, which often flies against the apparent facts of a situation, yet is unerringly accurate. You might even call this mysterious sixth sense a little magical. Actually what has happened is that they have used functions of the psyche other than the senses and the rational intellect to assess the situation. What other function, you may well ask. Why, any fire sign can tell you: intuition.

For these reasons fire signs appear to have a lot of luck. They are the ones who win the races and the pools, invest in the one stock which climbs when the market is collapsing, set up a company to see a product which is suddenly needed in two year's time, peer into the smoky lens of the future and write books, make films, design fashions that are a prophecy rather than a reflection of now. And what happens when it goes wrong and the business collapses, the market crashes, the deal doesn't come off? Never mind. Somehow, some way, a solution will appear. There is an infuriatingly unquenchable trust in the future with fiery people. If you meet them when they are down and out, never mind, it will all come out right one day, somehow. And what is maddening is that it usually does - if they haven't hooked up with some partner who stomps all over their dreams and convinces them that the way to happiness is the regular small salary cheque, their semi in the suburbs, 2.3 children, 1.5 dogs, and the in-laws over for Sunday dinner each week. If you find any fire signs living like that, get out your handkerchief. There is nothing sadder than a noble knight in rusted armour trying to clip the hedges in Neasden.

Ah, they are romantic, these fire signs. They sound almost too perfect, too magical, too heroic. How can you resist them? Not many people can. Have they no vices, then?

Remember what we said about every element having a secret dark side? Well, here it is, then, the secret vices of he element of fire. A little scenario might help to make this clear.

EARTH: Have you remembered to pay the telephone bill, dear?

FIRE: Telephone bill? (Beginning signs of irritation.) Yes, dear. Look, I'm trying to concentrate on this piece of writing. It's not going well.

EARTH: I've asked you at least a dozen times. We'll have the phone disconnected if you don't pay it.

FIRE: (Feeling guilty because he hates being accused of being irresponsible.) If you stop nagging me, I might remember to pay it. (Translation: I can't really cope, don't remind me.)

EARTH: You wouldn't remember. If I don't remind you nothing would ever get done. We'd have no telephone, we'd be thrown out of the house, there'd be nothing to eat, the children would have no clothes…

FIRE: (Losing temper) Will you just for once leave me alone? Now you've ruined my concentration. I can't write any more this evening. Why must you bother me with such petty rubbish? It will get paid.

EARTH: (Taking martyr pose) I'm the only one who does any giving in this relationship. I cook and clean and pay the bills and you just sit there staring out the window dreaming. Why don't you get a proper job?

FIRE: (Later, to his mistress) She just doesn't understand me. She crushes my creativity.

EARTH: (Later, to her solicitor) I want the house, five hundred pounds maintenance per month, and the car. I have to take care of myself, after all.

We can summarize the difficulties of the fiery signs by the following general pronouncement: the element of fire has a problem coping with the everyday world. Despite their wonderful vision, intuition, dash and insight, the world is, unfortunately for fire signs, full of the presence of objects and stubborn, conservative people. The world for many fire sign people, appears to have definite malice aforethought in its tendency to thwart them. They must either conquer it in grand style or withdraw into their strange world of fantasies. These frustrations may take the well-known and beloved form of government structures and red tape, traffic laws, taxes, bills, the necessity of earning an income, and the problem of remembering to feed, clothe and take care of that old incubus, the body - which, after all, is made of the substance of the world.

So our fiery friends, though they may be wonderfully successful in any enterprise which entails speculation and the inauguration of creative ideas rather than routine and bondage to detail, often cannot leave the house without forgetting car keys or wallet or drive down the street without incurring a traffic violation - if the car will start at all, brute beast that it is. It is this kind of experience which forces many fire signs into the 'misunderstood genius' syndrome. But it is not really society which is creating the problem - albeit it is all too frequently too conservative, too stolid, and at least twenty to fifty years behind the leaping intuitive vision of fire. It is the secret, unknown, unconscious world of the senses, of matter itself, which poses fire with his greatest problem. And it is often his body itself.

I have known a great number of fiery people, who hold an active dislike of their bodies. This may range from dislike of the appearance - and here the peculiar fantasy life of fire is most evident, for the person's body may be, by popular standards, very beautiful. But there is just something about flesh itself - flesh divorced from the glamorous, hazy images as though seen through a gauze, denuded of its associated symbols, flesh that gets sick, grows old, produces hair and warts and perspiration and cellulite - which is a mystery and a terror. It may be concluded from this that many fire sign people are hypochondriacs. You would be right if you guessed that. It isn't really the poor Virgos; they merely worry about the possibility of germs and disease, which is something else altogether. But fire is afraid of his own body, for it seems, all to often, like an enemy, an intruder, something into which he feels stuffed, as it were, like a sausage into a sausage-skin. Some fiery people will even admit to you, after a couple of whiskies and if softly asked, that they don't really want to be in a body at all, it's too confining, too restrictive, too 'formed', somehow. They are blithe spirits, volatile, burning marshlights, and dragging around the inert old thing is a damned nuisance - bearable if it goes on running, bloody difficult if it doesn't. A good many health freaks and dietary divas and macrobiotic and massage masters are fire signs trying to deal, albeit, in a rather exaggerated way, with that unknown and fascinating world of the senses.

Which takes us to the thing which will interest you the most, if you are involved in a relationship with the fiery trigon of signs: their sex life. At the risk of incurring an appropriately fiery explosion from my fire sign readers, it must nevertheless be said that the fiery temperament is more prone to feelings of sexual inadequacy than any other group. Feelings, I said. It has nothing to do with performance, about which many fire signs are so obsessive that, were there competitions to determine such things, they would undoubtedly walk off with all the awards. The secret, vague, nagging feeling that one is a sexual failure. It comes from all that lack of understanding about the body. If you don't make friends with your body, your sexuality is going to remain a mystery to you, and you may often feel as though your body is going about its own business while you have nothing whatsoever to say in the matter. And another funny thing about fire is that, being so rooted in the world of fantasy, the body becomes unreliable, and is likely to show the evidence of emotional frustration, resentment, fear, and anger quickly as various forms of what we politely call 'sexual problems'. They are not really sexual. They have to do with the rather tenuous relationship fire has with the earth plane. But they can wreak havoc in relationships nonetheless.

You see, fire lives, if you remember, in a world of fantasy. Objects by themselves are at best boring, at worst frightening. They have to be invested with meaning, charged with glamorous or romantic connotations. In other words, objects become symbols to a fire sign. Simple appreciation of the body and bodily sensations is difficult, without the appropriate fantasy. So the element of fantasy in a fire sign's romantic relations is liable to be very strong. By fantasy, we mean anticipation, visualization, expectation, need for erotic stimuli verbally, visually, imaginatively. No one loves the strip club or the porn cinema or the erotic photograph or the black silk underwear quite so much as the fire signs. In fact, this element of fantasy is often so strong with a fire sign that it can become more important than the actual sexual act itself. Sounds strange? Not to fire. Sex is, for them, a thing of the mind as much as the body.

Fine, you may say. Erotic fantasies are normal, to be encouraged. We live in an enlightened age. At least, we're suppose to live in an enlightened age. But the problem comes with the choice of partner that fire signs make. We will go into this in much more detail later. Suffice it to say, for the time, that the fire signs as a group are attracted most strongly to earth. And earth is the most literal, the most basic, the most sensual, the least prone to fantasy of any of the astrological elements. So what happens? The poor fire sign often feels as though there is something wrong with him, since his partner is getting off on his hairy chest or muscular arms or cute little paunch while he is desperately trying to conjure the atmosphere of Mata Hari meeting Clint Eastwood in a '30s club in Berlin by candlelight with Marlene Dietrich singing Gestapo songs in the background.

The matter-of-fact approach of earth to sexuality is likely to make our fiery type a little uncomfortable. He may feel as though he (or she) is obliged to 'perform successfully', which is a disastrous expectation. In fact, expecting any kind of earthy performance, sexual or otherwise, from fire is likely to lead to disaster. Unless their fantasy is with them, fire signs often go impotent or frigid. This stems from the complexity of fire's approach to their senses. But the fire sign who 'fails' is liable to blame his partner, since it is very uncomfortable to blame oneself. And the blame may be one of several types.

There is the 'I simply can't perform like a machine every second Thursday', variety. (Subsidiary subplots run to: 'Not tonight, dear. I have a headache' or 'I had a long day at the office etc.') There is the 'Our sex life has become boring, there's something missing from it' variety. (Subplot involves either the 'together couple' who explore silk undies/strip clubs together, or the less together couple who try to replace those elusive fantastic possibilities with 'open' marriage, wife-swapping, lovers, etc.) Fire, like blondes, has more fun? Don't kid yourself. It's no fun having to prove yourself constantly by playing Don Juan or Donna Juana to every available contestant just to make sure you're actually a member of the human race.

Over-compensation, that most common of human traits, often surfaces in the fire signs either in attempts to prove sexual prowess or attempts to prove material prowess. (Even athletic prowess.) The difference between the fiery sports champion and the earthy one, though they may seem, to the casual observer, to be the same, is that the earthy gymnast - sexual or otherwise - enjoys the sensations, and does it because it feels good; the fiery gymnast aims to win, because the act is not nearly so interesting as the anticipations and the recollection.

Romantic liaisons, for the fire signs, often begin as a fairy tale and end as a cage. No fun at all, since this propensity for unreliability in relationships leads to tremendous loneliness and a big fat sense of failure. And to complicate things, fire sign people often find it hard to articulate their needs - partly because fantasies are hard to put into words and partly because, even if they could be, more stolid types have a habit of stomping all over them. As Mick Jagger sings, 'What can a poor boy do except join a rock-and-roll band?

Fire signs are very prone to violent physical passions, which they call love. This unfortunate scenario usually ends with the sad revelation that all cats are grey at night. They can become cynical and brutal, masking their tremendous romanticism and idealism; always seeking restlessly for that spiritual soul-mate who will secretly understand the fears that drive them without demanding that they explain themselves, who can fan their little hearth fire into a mighty creative conflagration; who will contain them without imprisoning them. Are there such people? Not likely. Only in fantasy, since any red-blooded partner, whatever the astrological element, cannot always provide a new scenario every night. Sooner or later the fire signs must learn to balance their vision with a little realism and a little appreciation of the things of the earth. The present can be just as interesting as the past and the future. Facts can be just as exciting as possibilities. But balancing is not the same as changing. Anybody who thinks they can tame fire into a meek domestic creature is liable to get badly burned.