They are skinny (“dry”), but their bodies are reservoirs of enormous energy. According to ancient astro-medical treatises, the choleric temperament is the embodiment of summer. The 1975 film Nights and Days (Noce i dnie) is a period drama depicting the loves and struggles of the fictional, upper-class Niechcic family in the latter half of the 19th century. One of the most ravishing scenes in the history of Polish cinema takes place in the summer. Women in dresses holding parasols, men in light linen suits, are all running toward the water. They’re running, and yet they seem to be flying, because the dynamics of the scene are so stunning, with a waltz by Warsaw-born composer Waldemar Kazanecki playing in the background. When they reach the magnificent lake covered with water lilies, Barbara Ostrzeńska—the heroine of Nights and Days played by the stunning Jadwiga Barańska—says to the man beside her: “Look, such beautiful water lilies!” And so, actor Karol Strasburger’s Józef Toliboski wades into the thick dark water without hesitation. “He dove in as he stood, submerged himself up to the shoulders and returned with an armful of heavy white flowers,” wrote author Maria Dąbrowska, describing this scene in the original novel of the same name. “A lawyer of average height though handsome,” Józef is Barbara’s one true love. But if one were to observe this summer landscape from another time, from the depths of a different history, Józef’s dark, thick beard and “raw testimony to absolute readiness” seems typical of the choleric temperament. At least, this is how thinkers and physicians depicted the Latin cholericus type throughout the ages. In their writings, they were the human embodiment of summer. To them, it wasn’t just a metaphor.
Caustic Humor
Usually, the choleric type is skinny. According to ancient philosophers, their hair is thick, usually dark or black, sometimes a red of saffron-like intensity, their eyes deeply set. They have a sharp nose, an often sallow complexion, and, unfortunately, very brittle teeth. The physical features of a choleric are a reflection of their temperament, which is never static—prone to outbursts, highly impulsive, and emotionally volatile. This susceptibility to extremes in cholerics is in turn the result of “excessive heat and burning humors,” as Polish doctor and botanist Simon de Lowicz wrote at the beginning of the 16th century. The fire is set by its patron planet Mars, which makes this personality type both “cruel and savage”—as described by Renaissance physiognomist and German Carthusian monk Johannes de Indagine of 16th-century Westphalia. The foundations of medicine laid by the ancients (Hippocrates, Democritus, Aristotle) were based on a belief in the importance of the four bodily fluids—and remained so until the Enlightenment (before the emergence of psychology as a science in the 19th century). Blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm (mucus), mixed in the right proportions, determined a person’s health and temperament. According to Galen, the famous Greek physician, the temperament of every human being was already developed by the time they were born, since one of the four fluids—or humors—became dominant in the womb itself. Cholerics were born with more bile than others (from the Greek, chole) which was supposedly the source of their impatient disposition. As a “warm and dry” liquid, bile also caused extensive “body heat,” which in turn resulted in angry outbursts and premature crumbling of the bones (perhaps, its vestiges appear in modern dentistry’s bruxism, a condition of teeth grinding often attributed to stress and frustration).
A Bitter Pill to Swallow
In the writings of Hippocrates and his successors, all bodily fluids, including bile, were substances that also held spiritual, or, in contemporary terms, psychic value. Today we think about “happiness hormones,” such as serotonin or dopamine. These hormones are a mix of elements, supposedly ordinary chemistry that can be regulated with a pill. Hundreds of years ago, the red liquid that gushed from wounds, or the greenish-yellow one with which we digested greasy meat, were considered part of our “spirit.” They lived our lives, defined our temperament, determined our place in the world, decided whether we would be redheads or pale blondes. These fluids were proof of the unity of our body, spirit, and the cosmos. As a result, physiognomy—a pseudoscience that looked into the influence of humor on our physiology—became popular from the Renaissance onwards. Then came the Enlightenment, which curtailed the activity of physiognomists and the spread of their superstitions about the human appearance. Unfortunately, this same 17th and 18th-century age also broke the old bonds between humankind and the world; the ties that guaranteed the safety of both. The conviction that had been deeply rooted in the human mind—a cornerstone of modern ecological thinking—that by harming the world, we hurt ourselves, sadly disappeared with the advent of empirical sciences.
Today the body and its fluids are defined very narrowly in order to sustain the mass production of pharmaceuticals. Bile is secreted by hepatocytes (liver cells) that enable digestion and the absorption of fats. In the Hippocratic narrative, the greenish-yellow fluid is a lot more meaningful: it’s an energy store that allegedly fuelled superhuman endurance, a source of anger, a bitter remedy for human debauchery and greed. Today, the remnants of this primary meaning of bile can be traced in Polish culture, psychology, and language. There’s the bitter sediment of anger and frustration in the phraseology of the language that was masterfully recreated by Zygmunt Miłoszewski in his detective novel A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy), and director Boris Lankosz after him in the film adaptation. The criminal profiler Klejnocki, in the fantastic voice of Jacek Poniedziałek, says that the word for “bile” (żółć) is symbolic not only for being the longest to use solely Polish orthography but for “describing the nature of the Polish community: its bitterness, frustration, and sense of failure.”
Extinguishing Fire with Flame
The human microcosm, which was discussed centuries ago in relation to a person’s character, is nature’s mirror. It reflects the elements and natural phenomena. All of the diagrams created to illustrate the temperaments are a reflection of the quadruplicities that exist in nature: the elements, the seasons, the sides of the world, and so on. Fire, the choleric’s element, is an ambiguous substance. It burns, destroys, but also exudes energy and warmth. It illuminates, encourages action, opens up. Cholerics go through different paths in life (family, career) like fire: quick and decisive, they often leave destruction in their wake, but they also change the spirit of the situation, the place, the community they touch, to the benefit of all. Their power is to burn but also purify. The choleric temperament, just like the sanguine (air), is extroverted. Their imagination and subconscious is dominated by a claim of fire, war, and killing by Renaissance physicians. And they should dream as they walk or talk: rapidly, sometimes violently. When we think about cholerics, we imagine hotheads getting into fistfights (and if they are cholerics in love, getting into wild love affairs). The Polish imagination is dominated by the savage Cossack colonel of Jurko Bohun from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical novel With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem). He loves both war and the orphaned princess Helena Kurcewiczówna, unlike Noce i dnie’s Józef Toliboski, who remains cool-headed and calculating when deciding between romantic interest Barbara Ostrzeńska and the pragmatic choice represented by the wealthier Miss Narecka. Yet both Jurko and Józef might represent aspects of a choleric, who is much more than an ordinary trouble maker. This personality carries a flame with the capacity to start fires, as well as extinguish them. The choleric temperament holds many attitudes that are often contradictory. They can be stone-cold and task-oriented, they can be bullies or romantics, prone to crazy but inherently good impulses. If we find ourselves dealing with their more difficult side, let us think of it as we think of summer—which only lasts till fall. Translated from the Polish by Joanna Piechura
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