Pseudoscientists LOVE this one simple trick!
Calling all astrology girlies, MBTI subscribers, and people who still care about their Hogwarts House in the year 2022: I have a hell of a personality system for you! Everyone else, keep reading anyway. It’s about humors. Plural.
Humorism is a theory of medicine that developed sometime in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece and was popular in Europe until about the nineteenth century. The four humors of classical humorism were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Humorism is also known as humoralism, but I think that sounds stupid and I refuse to use that term. Any unexplainable ailment was taken to be an imbalance of the humors, usually an excess of one of the four. Eventually, these were linked to the four temperaments, or the four personalities, each the result of an excess of one humor.
While Hippocrates fleshed out the beginnings of humorism, Galen did a funnier thing: he made an alignment chart. In his work, De Temperamentis, he claims that people could be physiologically hot, cold, or balanced. This is fine. The other axis of being was a person being dry, wet, or balanced. This is less fine. Some people might even be the equivalent of True Neutral: lukewarm and moist. I encourage you to tag yourself. Each temperament sits in one corner of the alignment chart, at an extreme of the matrix.
The 4 temperaments are as follows:
- Sanguine, notable for an excess of blood.
This combination of hot and wet is associated with spring. Blood was thought to contain small amounts of the other humors, so it was sampled for any testing. A sanguine person is outgoing, impulsive, and easily distracted.
- Choleric, associated with an excess of yellow bile.
This is a combination of hot and dry and is associated with summer. A choleric person is ambitious, aggressive, and quick to anger.
- Melancholic, said to be the result of too much black bile.
This is a combination of cold and dry and is associated with autumn. Fun fact: cancer was attributed to a localised excess of black bile. A melancholic person is deeply loyal, self-reflective, and Very Gloomy. Melancholia eventually became the name of a mood disorder and is now in the DSM-5 as a subtype of major depression.
- Phlegmatic. This was believed to be an excess of any white or colourless body fluids, like sweat, saliva, or mucus, but not phlegm in its modern definition.
This is a combination of cold and wet and is associated with winter. A phlegmatic person is reserved, rational, and slow to change.
Physicians would attempt to induce the correct balance of humors as pertaining to the season. This could be done by changing the patient’s diet (humors were thought to be produced by digestive processes and food composition) or stealing their blood with vampire slugs.
As you may have suspected, the whole alignment chart as well as the humors themselves were drawn from the 4 Western classical elements: water, earth, fire, and air. This idea has survived in alchemy and popular culture since Ancient Greek times (though it was briefly damaged when the Fire Nation attacked). Other elemental schemes exist, but they may have a different number or combination of elements, such as the Ancient Indian panca-mahābhūta of earth, water, fire, air, and ether/void; or the Classical Chinese Wǔxíng of fire, water, wood, metal, and earth.
At various points in history, the whole idea of putting people in boxes based on traits they can’t control has been heavily criticised and sometimes replaced with religion or another fun and innovative version of the same thing. Humorism dominated Western medicine for about two millennia and still survives today. In the modern day, humorism, as well as many other personality categorizations, is considered to be pseudoscience. Subscribe to it at your own risk.
Of course, I have ulterior motives for writing this article. In my world, which is built on dad jokes, I cannot claim to write humour articles without writing a humor article. Mission accomplished.