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Quadruplicity

What it is

A quadruplicity is a group of four signs that share a mode (also called a quality, a modality or, in some modern books, a cross). There are three:

Where an element says what a sign is made of, the mode says how it moves: whether it starts things, holds them or changes them. The four signs of a mode stand 90° apart, so they make a cross on the wheel, linked to each other by squares and oppositions. Each contains one sign of every element, just as each triplicity contains one sign of every mode, which is why the four elements and three modes give each of the twelve signs a pairing of its own: Aries is cardinal fire, Taurus fixed earth, Gemini mutable air, and so on round the circle.

The word quadruplicity is a later coinage, made to match triplicity; the older authors simply sorted the signs. This entry is the overview; the entries on each mode hold the detail.

Names and their reasons

The classification is old, and the names have changed more than the idea.

  • Ptolemy speaks of solstitial (or tropical) signs, Cancer and Capricorn, where the Sun turns at the solstices; equinoctial signs, Aries and Libra, where day and night are made equal; solid signs, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius, which follow them and in which the season's quality is felt most firmly; and bicorporeal or double-bodied signs, the remaining four, which share the natures of the season ending and the season to come. (Nicholas deVore notes that Ptolemy used "bicorporeal" for the whole mutable group, Virgo included, whereas the word is now usually kept for Gemini, Sagittarius and Pisces, the signs drawn as double figures: the twins, the centaur, the two fish.)
  • Lilly calls them moveable, fixed and common. The moveable signs are also cardinal, because the Sun's entry into them marks the quarters of the year, and moveable "because when the Sun enters into Aries and Libra, the Weather and Season of the Year quickly varies and changes"; the fixed signs come when "the season of the yeer is fixed"; the common signs lie between and partake of both.
  • Modern astrology settled on cardinal, fixed and mutable, and often glosses them as initiating, sustaining and adapting.

All three namings rest on the same picture: each season has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the twelve signs repeat that pattern four times.

How it is read

In a birth chart, astrologers count which modes hold the planets, the Sun and Moon above all, and the Ascendant. A chart weighted towards one mode is read as leaning on that way of acting: cardinal, toward initiative and enterprise; fixed, toward persistence, loyalty and resistance to change; mutable, toward flexibility, learning and restlessness. A mode with nothing in it is read as a way of acting that comes less naturally and may be learned or borrowed from others. Stephen Arroyo and many modern writers read the balance of modes alongside the balance of elements; neither is a verdict on its own.

In aspect patterns, because squares and oppositions usually fall within a mode, hard configurations take the mode's colour. A T-square or Grand Cross is often named by it — a cardinal, fixed or mutable cross — and read through it: pressure to act, pressure that will not shift, or pressure that scatters. An aspect between two different modes is usually out of sign.

In horary and electional work, the modes give speed and duration. Lilly treats moveable signs as showing matters soon begun and soon changed, fixed signs as showing what lasts or stays put, and common signs as something between, often a matter that repeats or comes twice. Used with the houses, this is how the tradition estimates timing: angular houses and moveable signs for the shortest units, cadent houses and fixed signs for the longest.

In mundane astrology, the Sun's entries into the four cardinal signs (the equinoxes and solstices) are cast as the charts of the seasons; see ingress.

In a reading here

The timing a horary reading here gives follows this rule: the sign and house of the planet that applies to the perfecting aspect choose the unit, moveable signs and angular houses the shortest (days), common and succedent the middle (weeks), fixed and cadent the longest (months), with mixed testimonies given as a range.

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