problem.  And it is often his body itself. 

I have known a great number of fiery people, who hold an active dislike of their bodies.  This may range from dislike of the appearance - and here the peculiar fantasy life of fire is most evident, for the person's body may be, by popular standards, very beautiful.  But there is just something about flesh itself - flesh divorced from the glamorous, hazy images as though seen through a gauze, denuded of its associated symbols, flesh that gets sick, grows old, produces hair and warts and perspiration and cellulite - which is a mystery and a terror.  It may be concluded from this that many fire sign people are hypochondriacs.  You would be right if you guessed that.  It isn't really the poor Virgos; they merely worry about the possibility of germs and disease, which is something else altogether.  But fire is afraid of his own body, for it seems, all to often, like an enemy, an intruder, something into which he feels stuffed, as it were, like a sausage into a sausage-skin.  Some fiery people will even admit to you, after a couple of whiskies and if softly asked, that they don't really want to be in a body at all, it's too confining, too restrictive, too 'formed', somehow.  They are blithe spirits, volatile, burning marshlights, and dragging around the inert old thing is a damned nuisance - bearable if it goes on running, bloody difficult if it doesn't.  A good many health freaks and dietary divas and macrobiotic and massage masters are fire signs trying to deal, albeit, in a rather exaggerated way, with that unknown and fascinating world of the senses. 

Which takes us to the thing which will interest you the most, if you are involved in a relationship with the fiery trigon of signs:  their sex life.  At the risk of incurring an appropriately fiery explosion from my fire sign readers, it must nevertheless be said that the fiery temperament is more prone to feelings of sexual inadequacy than any other group.  Feelings, I said.  It has nothing to do with performance, about which many fire signs are so obsessive that, were there competitions to determine such things, they would undoubtedly walk off with all the awards.  The secret, vague, nagging feeling that one is a sexual failure.  It comes from all that lack of understanding about the body.  If you don't make friends with your body, your sexuality is going to remain a mystery to you, and you may often feel as though your body is going about its own business while you have nothing whatsoever to say in the matter.  And another funny thing about fire is that, being so rooted in the world of fantasy, the body becomes unreliable, and is likely to show the evidence of emotional frustration, resentment, fear, and anger quickly as various forms of what we politely call 'sexual problems'.  They are not really sexual.  They have to do with the rather tenuous relationship fire has with the earth plane.  But they can wreak havoc in relationships nonetheless. 

You see, fire lives, if you remember, in a world of fantasy.  Objects by themselves are at best boring, at worst frightening.  They have to be invested with meaning, charged with glamorous or romantic connotations.  In other words, objects become symbols to a fire sign.  Simple appreciation of the body and bodily sensations is difficult, without the appropriate fantasy.  So the element of fantasy in a fire sign's romantic relations is liable to be very strong.  By fantasy, we mean anticipation, visualization, expectation, need for erotic stimuli verbally, visually, imaginatively.  No one loves the strip club or the porn cinema or the erotic photograph or the black silk underwear quite so much as the fire signs.  In fact, this element of fantasy is often so strong with a fire sign that it can become more important than the actual sexual act itself.  Sounds strange?  Not to fire.  Sex is, for them, a thing of the mind as much as the body. 

Fine, you may say.  Erotic fantasies are normal, to be encouraged.  We live in an enlightened age.  At least, we're suppose to live in an enlightened age.  But the problem comes with the choice of partner that fire signs make.  We will go into this in much more detail later.  Suffice it to say, for the time, that the fire signs as a group are attracted most strongly to earth.  And earth is the most literal, the most basic, the most sensual, the least prone to fantasy of any of the astrological elements.  So what happens?  The poor fire sign often feels as though there is something wrong with him, since his partner is getting off on his hairy