A Summary of the Element of Water:
The Element of Water correlates to the emotional realm where subtle meanings and connectivity are perceived. There are 3 Signs of the Zodiac that express the qualities of Water: Cancer, Pisces and Scorpio. This Element demonstrates understanding, empathy, compassion and intuitive awareness. Water also represents the energy and power of the unconscious forces that motivate us.
An excess of the Element of Water in one’s chart often exemplifies the emotional polarities of swinging from one emotional extreme to the other, turbulence, often leading to feelings of weakness, helplessness, dependency or insecurity. Lack of Water Elements may exhibit as cold, unsympathetic, disconnected or indifferent.
The Element of Water from a Psychological Standpoint:
The Emotional Type: Where Air is least at home, we find the Water Signs Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces developing their greatest capacities. These Signs predominantly perceive and evaluate the world in an emotional way. The logical connection between things, so important to the Air Signs, doesn’t play a direct role. For Water types the feeling evoked by a person, object or situation is important. Everything is judged on this basis.
For consciousness, feeling is an almost inexplicable process, even when feeling is the specific means through which one views the world. It gives a certain form of “after the event” consciousness; in other words, the Water Sign is able to identify (unintentionally) with someone else and become that person to such a degree that they only later learn to establish their own identity on the basis of all that they are not.
A deep, sensitive, and emotional involvement in events is characteristic for Water Signs, even though they don’t necessarily show it. Sensitivity can make them so vulnerable that they tend to hide behind an unemotional mask, one reason why a Water type doesn’t always come across as a warm, sensitive and empathetic type. The feeling process can take hold of this type to such an extent that the outside world only serves as impulse, bringing the process into motion or sustaining it, so that a warm reaction doesn’t need to follow. The Element of Water can then be “cold” to the touch as well.
Because Water consciousness orients itself through the feeling function, it needs constant stimulation from outside. That need often makes Water Signs demanding, yearning, absorbing and clinging. Through emotional contact with the outside world, they can literally feel things that can’t be explained. They come so close to the core of a situation they sometimes hit the nail on the head. Bringing their conclusions into words is a difficult business for them for that reason.
Skillful Qualities:
nurturing, sustaining, aesthetic, providing, protecting, shielding, retiring, feeling, emotional, touching the hidden, healing, sensitive, reserved, empathetic, deep, flowing, bonding, merging, compassionate, yielding, absorptive, artistic, changing, psychic, boundless, resourceful, impressionable, receptive, adaptive, helpful, dissolving, amorphous, mysterious, understanding, intuitive
Unskillful Qualities:
overprotective, smothering, clinging, needy, inconsistent, overemotional, maudlin, fearful, insecure, paranoid, thin-skinned, shy, undefined, chaotic, disordered, lacks ego-strength, weak, helpless, powerless, dependent, “watered down,” victimized, martyred, secretive, romantic, untruthful, deceptive, covert, sensualist, exaggerated, manipulative, uncommunicative, self-indulgent, hysterical