Water, we are told by science, is the simplest of the elements:  two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and presto!, we have water.  Water is also the most unshaped of the elements:  temperature can alter its constitution to ice or steam, objects impose their shape on it.  The greater percentage of the human body - something like 85% - is composed of water.  Water is all around us, the source of life.  Water covers two-thirds of the earth's surface.  And from water, the Koran tells us, all life begins. 

The element of water, astrologically, is the most enigmatic of all the elements.  It is the most 'primitive' in that it is further from the rational realm which we are pleased to call human thought.  Look at the symbolism of the three watery signs:  Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.  All three are cold-blooded creatures in nature, very far on the evolutionary ladder from the warm-blooded mammalian kingdom which has produced its dubious fruit of man.  All three inhabit areas of the earth where man cannot live:  the depths of the ocean, the barren seashores, the desert.  When we examined the symbolism of the element of air, we saw that there were no bestial figures among them.  The Twins, the Scales, the Waterbearer.  An absence of 'animal'.  Now, when we look at water, we see an absence of 'human'.  What this means is not that the water signs are 'cold-blooded' in the sense we colloquially mean it.  Far from it.  But it may mean - among other things - that the structures, theories, and principles of differentiated human thought are not the mode of operation of these ambiguous signs.  The water signs move like the realm of nature:  with instinct, at home with that which is nonrational, unexplainable, sometimes magical.  They are all motivated with feeling - and feeling, as everyone except a few obsessively fanatical material scientists will admit, is not something you can measure by statistics, define by hypothesis, contain within rationally understandable laws.