Sign

Meaning

A sign is one of the twelve equal parts of the zodiac, the band of sky that follows the ecliptic, the path the Sun appears to trace through the year. Each sign is 30° long, and they run in order from Aries to Pisces, counted from the point where the Sun crosses the celestial equator at the March equinox.

Astrologers read a sign as a manner, not a thing. The planet says what is at work, the sign says how it tends to work, and the house says where in life it plays out. Mars stays Mars in every sign; in Aries it acts at once, in Taurus it takes its time and does not let go.

Each sign weaves three threads. Its element, fire, earth, air or water, gives its temperament. Its mode, cardinal, fixed or mutable, gives its rhythm: starting, holding or adapting. Its polarity, positive for fire and air and negative for earth and water, leans outward or inward. Each sign is also the home of a planet, its ruler, through which its affairs are traced.

Every chart holds all twelve signs somewhere: on a planet, on a house cusp, or quietly in the background. That is why astrologers are wary of reducing anyone to a Sun sign. The Sun is one voice in the chart, an important one, but not the whole conversation.

In practice

• The Sun sign is the sign the Sun was in at birth, the one in newspaper columns: a centre of gravity rather than a complete portrait.
• The Moon’s sign and the rising sign, the sign on the Ascendant, weigh as much in most practice: the first for needs and moods, the second for how someone meets the world.
• A sign on a house cusp colours that area of life, and its ruler, wherever it stands, ties that area to another one.
• Three or more planets in one sign make a stellium, and that sign’s style becomes a theme of the chart.
• The balance of elements and modes across the planets shows which ways of acting come easily and which are used less.

Across traditions

• Jyotish, the astrology of India, uses the same twelve signs, the rashis, with the same traditional rulers, but measures them from the stars: the sidereal zodiac. The two zodiacs now stand about 24° apart, so many placements fall one sign earlier in an Indian chart.
• Human Design lays its 64 gates, each 5°37′30″ wide, on the same tropical zodiac as Ulune’s charts, beginning with gate 41 at 2° Aquarius.
• The Chinese calendar divides the same path of the Sun into 24 solar terms of 15°. Its twelve animals name years, months and two-hour periods; the months follow the solar terms, so each animal month begins at 15° of a sign, but the animal people call their “Chinese sign” is that of the year.

Origin and history

The zodiac grew out of Babylonian astronomy. Star lists from the early first millennium BC name the constellations that lie in the path of the Moon; by the late 5th century BC Babylonian scribes measured the planets in twelve equal signs of 30°, and the oldest known horoscopes, from Babylon, date from the same years, the earliest from 410 BC. Greek astronomers took the scheme over and translated its names, and in Hellenistic Egypt astrologers built on it the horoscopic astrology still practised today.

Around 130 BC Hipparchus found that the equinoxes slide slowly backwards against the stars, about 1° every 72 years: the precession of the equinoxes, which Ptolemy recorded in the Almagest. In the Tetrabiblos Ptolemy also argued that the signs take their natures from the seasons, so they must be counted from the equinoxes and solstices. That is the tropical zodiac, and over two thousand years it has drifted almost a whole sign away from the stars that gave the signs their names.

The constellations are also unequal, and thirteen of them meet the ecliptic. By the boundaries astronomers published in 1930, the Sun now spends about 45 days in front of Virgo, under a week in front of Scorpius and about 18 days in front of Ophiuchus, the Serpent-bearer. Signs are a measure rather than a picture, so astrology keeps its twelve equal parts.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune uses the tropical zodiac only. Positions come from Swiss Ephemeris, built on NASA JPL’s DE441, as apparent longitudes seen from the Earth and measured from the March equinox point of the date; the sign is the 30° part a longitude falls in, from 0° up to, but not including, 30°. The calendar gives the minute the Sun, the Moon, the planets, Chiron and the North Node change sign, each an ingress.

The Sun changes sign on slightly different days from year to year, since a year is not a whole number of days: between 1950 and 2050 it enters Aries almost always on 20 or 21 March. It also moves fastest in early January, when the Earth is closest to it, so it spends about 29½ days in Capricorn and about 31½ in Cancer.

Without a birth time the chart is cast for 12:00, and Ulune checks whether each body keeps its sign all day. When one does not, usually the Moon, the balance of elements and modes is marked as uncertain, and the reading of a quick body gives both signs. The table marks a body in the last degree of a sign (anaretic) and one within 1° of 0° Aries. The chart’s first page counts the ten planets, Sun to Pluto, by element and mode, and the table weighs them, with the angles too when the time is known.

Correspondences