Was planetary adjectives used to describe personality in traditional astrology?

I noticed so far every astrologer including our beloved Minderwiz has all the time emphasized traditional astrology does not describe signs by personality. For example Minderwiz stated in a Renaissance astrologer would not have called someone impulsive and brash an Aries personality.

However all traditional astrologers and I even seen Minderwiz use it in his interpretations, seem to instead replace adjective with planetarian terms.

For example on enyclopedia going called "Saturnine personality" as being melancholic, pessimistic, and full of self-restraint. Traits that we would call "Capricornish" in modern astrology.

There are much more examples I could put but the above is the gist.

Is this accurate? I'm quite curious because all too often mi in many texts I came across they used words like "Venusian" to describe associated personality traits rather than "Libran" or "Taurean".

Darth MI said:

I noticed so far every astrologer including our beloved Minderwiz has all the time emphasized traditional astrology does not describe signs by personality. For example Minderwiz stated in a Renaissance astrologer would not have called someone impulsive and brash an Aries personality.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your decalaration of love

No they would not have used the term 'Aries Personality', that is not to say that they would not attribute some characteristics to the sign, which we might term 'personality', though they would see it quite differently.

For example, Vettius Valens says 'Those who have been born according to the logic of Aries (Aries on the Ascendant) can have a myriad of qualites depending on the nature of the planetary ruler of the sign of Aries and how this star is situated in the chart

That is their qualities will depend on the nature of Mars and in what Place, Mars is found in the chart. I won't bother giving the list of examples he provides, unless you really want to know.

DarthMI said:

However all traditional astrologers and I even seen Minderwiz use it in his interpretations, seem to instead replace adjective with planetarian terms.

For example on enyclopedia going called "Saturnine personality" as being melancholic, pessimistic, and full of self-restraint. Traits that we would call "Capricornish" in modern astrology.

There are much more examples I could put but the above is the gist.

Is this accurate? I'm quite curious because all too often mi in many texts I came across they used words like "Venusian" to describe associated personality traits rather than "Libran" or "Taurean".

Click to expand...

As far as it goes it is accurate. From medieval times, onward, you are more likely to see personality or character described as Choleric, Sanguine, Melancholic, or Phelgmatic, terms that are still used today, though rarely by healthcare professionals. That being said, the descriptions they do give are clearly recognisable in terms of medieval psychology.

Luckily for me, the example you chose, Aries, is where Valens is explicit. When he gets on to the other signs, he will talk about people born under the sign (remember he means Ascendant) and provide the examples but not his qualifying statement that it depends on the nature of the Sign ruler and its situation in the chart.

The ascription of personality types to Signs, per se, is the product of Alan Leo in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Leo produced them by using the Sign rulers as his base and modified them according to other features of the sign. So Scorpios are not identical to Ariens. This is not something that is actually a lot different from Valens, who would give different examples for Scorpio to Aries, as Scorpio is a Nocturnal, Feminine, Fixed Water sign and Aries is a Diurnal, Masculine, Cardinal, Fire sign. These modify the interpretation, along with other associations of Scorpio, such as a perceived connection to slavery and that it is a Southern Sign, (the Sun is in the Southern Hemisphere when it transits Scorpio)