Ingress

Meaning

An ingress is the moment a body crosses the border between two signs, from 29°59′ of one to 0° of the next. The word comes from the Latin ingressus, a stepping in. Nothing in the sky marks the line: the twelve signs are equal 30° stretches of the zodiac, counted from the point where the Sun stands at the spring equinox.

Astrologers read an ingress as a change of tone. What a planet stands for stays the same, but the sign it enters gives it a new style. Mars in Taurus is read as slow and stubborn effort; once it crosses into Gemini, as quick and restless effort. The slower the planet, the larger the change feels. The Moon changes sign every two to three days and colours a mood. Saturn changes sign every two and a half years or so, and its ingress is read as a change of climate that everyone shares for years.

In practice

• How often: the Moon takes about two and a half days per sign, the Sun about a month, Mercury and Venus a few weeks, Mars about six weeks, Jupiter about a year, Saturn about two and a half years, Uranus about seven, Neptune about fourteen. Pluto, on a very stretched orbit, stays from about twelve to thirty years.
• Back and forth: a planet that turns retrograde near the end of a sign can step back into the previous one, then cross again after its station. Pluto first entered Aquarius in March 2023, slipped back into Capricorn that June, and crossed the line five times in all before settling in Aquarius in November 2024. Tradition reads the return to the old sign as a last review before the move.
• The Sun’s four cardinal ingresses open the seasons: its entry into Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.
• The Moon’s ingress ends a void-of-course span, the hours after its last major aspect in the old sign.
• In a personal chart, an ingress matters most in the house that holds the new sign: a planet entering the sign on the cusp of the 10th house, for instance, begins its passage through the career sector of that chart.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, fixed to the stars, about 24° away from the tropical one today. The Sun’s ingresses there fall about 24 days later, and the Sun’s entry into each sign, the sankranti, marks the solar months and many festivals.
• Chinese astronomy divides the Sun’s path into twenty-four solar terms of 15° each; half of them begin where a tropical sign begins.

Origin and history

Ptolemy ties the beginnings of the signs to the equinoxes and solstices, and reads the new or full Moon that comes before each of these four ingresses for the season that follows. Astrologers writing in Arabic made the Sun’s entry into Aries the chart of the whole year: Abu Ma’shar’s book on the revolutions of the world-years reads it for the events of the coming year, a practice that mundane astrology, the astrology of nations, still keeps. The exact moment of an ingress depends on the planet’s apparent place as seen from the Earth, which modern ephemerides compute with methods like those of Jean Meeus.

How Ulune calculates it

• The Calendar follows the Sun, the Moon, the planets out to Pluto, Chiron and the North Node. Positions are apparent, seen from the centre of the Earth, in the tropical zodiac, from the Swiss Ephemeris.
• Each body is sampled every twelve hours; the samples are split at its stations, so a planet that crosses a border and comes back is seen twice. Each crossing is then refined on the ephemeris to the millisecond.
• A body that backs into the previous sign while retrograde is marked as such, and its reading says so.
• The Moon’s sign changes appear in each day’s Moon line rather than among the day’s events, and the year view leaves them out.
• When a chart is open, the reading of an ingress names the house of that chart where the new sign lies.

Correspondences