Have you noticed that the daily horoscope seems to be an integral part of any mass communicated written material? Everyone who reads would definitely know about this, a small dedicated section of the publish which is usually divided into 12. These are to represent the 12 signs of the Western zodiac. But how reliable is it? We all know that it can’t be possible that people’s futures are only divided by 12. Yet why is this section so popularly accepted, and even mandatory in a newspaper or social magazine? Is it not most likely utter nonsense? I would not be focusing on how the mass media is polluting our minds in this post. Instead, I will be looking at how accurate these readings are and where they come from.
In Western astrology, it is not only the signs that are vital, there are also planets and further on to that “houses”. We, as human nature tends to dictate, love to identify ourselves with our sign. It is common knowledge that different signs exhibit different general characteristics. However, 2 Aries-born people do not think exactly alike, neither does 2 Taurus-born or 2 Gemini-born. They share some common features and behaviours but you would have realized that people sharing the same sign (even the same birthday) don’t present in the same way. The reasons for this is that we are usually only looking at what is termed the Sun sign.
The Sun sign is defined as the sign of the zodiac of which the Sun was “residing” during your birth. This may seem hard to visualize, but just imagine that the planets are revolving in outer space. Science usually says that the planets revolve around the Sun. Instead of focusing on that, imagine that the planets are revolving around the Earth. Now if we keep the Earth in its place, it would seem that the Sun is revolving around us. Astronomers have named the various star signs out there and they represent a vast coordinate system. Now all that has to be imagined is that the 12 zodiac signs each have an equal segment in space to itself, like a clock face is equally divided by the numbers on the edges. At the point you are born, the position of the Sun would be lying in one of these segments, and that segment corresponds to a zodiac sign. This is how we get the Sun sign.
We all know the Earth revolves around the Sun once a year, so if we divide it equally, each zodiac sign takes up a “segment” of about one month. Most astrologers would say this is the most important sign, which is what we are reading in the newspaper. However, there are actually 2 more very important aspects which are the Moon sign and the Rising Sign or Ascendant which I will talk about in the next article.