Quick answer: The six non-naturals are the six controllable factors that classical Galenic medicine used to keep the four humors, and therefore the temperament, in balance: air and environment, food and drink, sleep and waking, motion and rest, evacuation and repletion, and the passions of the soul. A physician adjusted them day by day to suit each person's constitution.
Classical medicine did not see health as something you simply have. It saw it as a balance you had to tend day by day, and the tools for tending it were the six non-naturals. The humors and the temperament described what you are. The non-naturals described what you do to keep that nature working at its best.
What "Non-Natural" Actually Means
The name confuses a modern ear, so it is worth settling first. Galenic physicians divided the study of the body into three classes. The naturals were what a body is made of: the elements, the humors, the faculties, and the constitution you are born with. The contra-naturals were the things against nature: disease, its causes, and its effects. Between them stood the non-naturals. These were neither part of your nature nor diseases in themselves. They were the external and behavioral factors that act on the body and can push it toward health or sickness. They were "non-natural" only in the sense of "not part of the body's own substance." In practice they were the most useful part of the whole system, because they were the part a person could actually change.
Galen and the Origin of the Scheme
The idea goes back to Galen of Pergamon in the second century. He gathered the Hippocratic emphasis on air, diet, exercise and environment into a working framework for regimen. Galen never fixed the canonical list of six in the tidy form later ages used; that came together among his Arabic and medieval Latin heirs. Avicenna organized much of it in the Canon of Medicine around 1025, and the six-fold list became a fixture of the medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier. It was repeated in countless regimens of health down to the early modern period. Nicholas Culpeper and his English contemporaries still worked from the same six categories in the seventeenth century.
The logic is simple. Each of the four temperaments is a particular blend of the primary qualities: hot or cold, wet or dry. Air can warm or cool you, food can moisten or dry you, exercise heats, rest cools, and so on. So the regimen was a matter of matching the non-naturals to the constitution. You gave the cold-dry melancholic warming and moistening habits, and the hot-dry choleric cooling and moistening ones. The aim was always the balanced middle the tradition called eucrasia.
The Six, One by One
Classical authors listed six factors, sometimes splitting or combining them slightly, but the core set is stable.
- Air and environment. The surrounding air, climate, season and place. This was considered the most powerful of the six, because you breathe it constantly and cannot escape it.
- Food and drink. Diet, understood by the warming, cooling, moistening and drying qualities of each food rather than by calories. This is the regimen face of nutrition by temperament.
- Sleep and waking. Both the amount and the timing. Sleep was held to be moistening and cooling, waking drying and warming.
- Motion and rest. Exercise and stillness. Motion generates vital heat and helps evacuation; rest cools and conserves.
- Evacuation and repletion. The balance between what the body takes in and what it expels. This covered everything from digestion to the older practices of purging and phlebotomy, and fullness itself.
- The passions of the soul. The accidentia animae, the emotions: joy, anger, fear, grief. Anger was read as heating, fear and grief as cooling, and the physician treated the mind as part of the body's balance.
The Sign and Season Connection
This is where the regimen meets the sky. Classical medicine was inseparable from astrology, and several of the non-naturals were read directly through the zodiac and the heavens. Air and environment ran through the seasons, and the seasons carried humoral signatures fixed to the solar signs: spring is sanguine and moist, summer choleric and hot, autumn melancholic and dry, winter phlegmatic and cold. A physician who understood a patient's temperament also read the season and its ruling signs before adjusting the regimen. A hot summer aggravated an already choleric fire type, and a raw winter deepened a phlegmatic one.
Evacuation carried the strongest astrological rule of all. Physicians timed phlebotomy and purging by the Moon and the sign it occupied, following the doctrine of the Zodiac Man: you avoided cutting or treating the body part governed by the sign the Moon was passing through. The passions were colored by the chart too. A Mars-heavy nativity inclined toward the heating passion of anger, and a Saturn-heavy one toward the cooling weight of grief.
| Non-natural | Qualities it moves | Season / sign link | What it tempered | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Air and environment | Any, by climate | The four seasons and their signs | The dominant seasonal humor | | Food and drink | Warms, cools, moistens, dries | Diet keyed to the birth temperament | The constitutional humor | | Sleep and waking | Sleep moistens and cools | Lunar timing in some traditions | Excess dryness or heat | | Motion and rest | Motion heats, rest cools | Choleric and fire signs need less heating | Coldness or repletion | | Evacuation and repletion | Reduces excess humor | Timed by the Moon and the Zodiac Man | Any humor in surplus | | The passions | Anger heats, grief cools | Mars heats, Saturn cools the mood | Emotional imbalance |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why were they called "non-naturals" if they matter so much?
The word does not mean unnatural or artificial. In Galenic theory the "naturals" were the body's own substance, the elements and humors, and the "contra-naturals" were diseases. The non-naturals were the third class: the external and behavioral factors, air, diet, sleep, exercise, evacuation and emotion, that act on the body without being part of its substance. They were called non-natural simply because they lay outside the body's own nature. Even so, they were the most practical lever a person had over their health.
How do the six non-naturals connect to the zodiac signs?
Through season and through the Moon. The seasons carry humoral signatures tied to their solar signs, so air and environment were read against a spring, summer, autumn or winter sky. The regimen was then adjusted to whichever seasonal humor might aggravate a person's temperament. Evacuation, especially bloodletting, was timed by the sign the Moon occupied under the doctrine of the Zodiac Man. And the passions were colored by planets like Mars and Saturn in the birth chart.
Should I use the six non-naturals to manage my health today?
They were a historical and symbolic framework, and the humoral claims behind them belong to the medicine of their own age rather than to modern science. Their value now is as cultural history, and as a way of reflecting on the rhythm of daily life: air, food, sleep, movement, and mood.
Explore Your Own Temperament
To see the elemental and planetary balance the classical regimen worked from, cast a free birth chart or read your constitution through a health report, which speaks in classical temperament rather than fortune-telling. For more traditional technique explained plainly, browse the blog.
