Did Your Astrology Sign Just Change?

In the last few days, there’s been quite the buzz about a recent article on the Zodiac.  This article states that the Zodiac is off by about four weeks, and that the sun and planets travel through 13 constellations, not just 12.  It’s all over Facebook, if you haven’t noticed.

So, what does this mean?  Did your sign just change as the article suggests?

No! Not in the slightest!

Before I continue with my rebuttal, let me further discuss the facts surrounding their claim.

Yes, we are off by nearly a full sign right now.  This is due to Precession, which is well known and understood. Basically, every 2000 years or so, we drift backward a full sign.  This is how the ages are calculated and it’s all calibrated via the Spring Equinox.

If you were to get up just before sunrise on the Spring Equinox and look to the East just above the rising sun, you should be looking at the constellation Pisces.  That is because the Spring Equinox is the day that the sun moves into Aries from Pisces, so Pisces rises up just ahead of the sun.

However,if you do this on 3/20/2011, you will see Aquarius, not Pisces.  When the sun is stated to be in Aries, it will actually be in Pisces.  So yes, we are a full sign behind where we should be.

Once the rising sun on the Spring Equinox actually shifts into Aquarius, we will have entered the Age of Aquarius you’ve heard so much about.

Precession has been known about for ages and eons for it is the measure of the ages! You’re all free to go now, nothing new here…

Oh, wait. There’s more.  They also claim that there’s a 13th constellation in the Zodiac.  Well, yeah, there is that.  If you trace the path of the sun through the heavens, it does technically cross over into a constellation (by modern convention) that is not counted in the Zodiac. But again, I assert this doesn’t change a thing. Allow me to explain.

Some 15 years ago, I made a request to the Universe.  I had been learning about all sorts of things, including Astrology, and I was curious to learn more. It was about that time when a colleague made the following claim, “A person in the room has more gravitational pull on a baby as he or she is born than say Pluto, so how can Astrology be true?”  Well, I didn’t have an answer to that and I wanted one.  So I made this request:

Please show me the most accurate description known to man as to how Astrology works.

I figured there’s got to be lots of theories out there, I was just asking to learn the most accurate one.

Well, lo and behold, within weeks I found myself buying two books, which I thought had nothing to do with Astrology, but that contained within them a scientific description of how Astrology works.  And here’s the best part.  The two theories completely agreed!

Ask and it is given!

So let me describe a metaphor to give you an idea as to how it works.  In a nutshell, Astrology has nothing to do with the stars, and nearly everything to do with the sun.

Our solar system is like a record player spinning at a specific rate.  It has been spinning at pretty much the same rate for ages and ages.  Even if it’s slowing down, it is changing so slowly that we’ll never see any discernible difference.

Now the sun itself is the record.  It’s sitting on the turntable and playing its songs.  The album that is our sun happens to have 12 songs that take about a month each to play.  And the record player automatically switches back to the first song when the last one finishes.

As the sun plays, its music is heard throughout the solar system.  It is that music that affects us!

Think of it this way.  When we’re growing up, we learn the language spoken around us.  Even if there were no schools, this would still happen.  Humans learn language naturally. If everyone around us speaks with an accent, we’ll have an accent too.

Well, each of the songs played by the sun has an accent.  We hear that song at some point in our development (before we’re born), and as a result, we ‘talk’ funny.  But, just as with accents, we can change.  Just because we’ve lived most of our lives in America, doesn’t mean we can’t learn to speak French, but it’s hard.  Surely you’ve met someone, born elsewhere, who’s lived in the US for most of their life, and yet you can still hear their accent and tell where they are from.

So Astrology is about tendency.  It is an accent of personality.  Sagittarians tend to be optimistic and outgoing.  Cancers tend to be emotional and expressive.  Each can learn the other’s language, but it wouldn’t be the most natural for them.

[See my short story called A Trip Around the Sun.]

How about the planets?

Well, what I’ve described above is mostly how our Sun Sign affects us, which is what the article was primarily discussing. Now let’s talk about the planets.

You know how the moon creates tides in our oceans?  Well the planets create tides on the sun in a similar fashion!  They aren’t tides of water, but tides in the magnetics.  So, as the planets move around the sun, they affect its music.  They speed it up, or slow it down; they shift the key; and this affects us in subtle ways.

So, again, 90 percent of Astrology is about the sun and none of it is about the stars.  So why are the signs named after constellations?

Well, what better way to keep track of time?  We can see the stars at night and therefore keep track of time using them.  Someone (or group) at some time must have realized that there was a correlation between the energetics of Astrology and the positioning of the sun and planets against the background of stars.  Maybe they were told.  Who knows?

The fact is that the constellations are just how time (beat, rhythm) was kept. The shifting of this is not really an issue.

And consider this.  It’s easy to think that our system is flawed.  If it were perfect, we would have exactly 12 months, equal in size, and that never shift.  The lunar cycles would match the solar cycles and everything would be like clockwork.  The earth wouldn’t wobble and wouldn’t even be tilted.

But that’s not how it is. There are more than 12 lunar cycles in a year. The earth is tilted and does wobble.  And the moon drifts closer in and further out, a bit to the north at times and a bit to the south at other times. And no orbit anywhere is circular.

But look at the perfection in all of this.  The earth’s tilt creates our seasons.  Eclipses are infrequent and are visible from different places each time!  The earth’s wobble creates precession, which gives us a way to measure long time cycles.  In other words, deviations from perfection create variation and opportunity.  That’s what perfection really looks like!

Now, just because I don’t find the facts in that article to be relevant to the workings of Astrology as we’re used to, that doesn’t mean they aren’t significant.  For example, the discussion of a possible 13th sign could be symbolic.  [Visit Being Centered to read about my comparison of the 12 and the 13.]

And, fact is, the sun is changing!  There is lots of talk about what the sun has been doing lately and how it’s changing in ways we haven’t seen before.  Maybe the sun’s music will shift significantly, and maybe the result will be a new Astrology with 13 signs. But if that’s the case, it will affect the newly born more significantly than us – set in our ways – adults.

Our birth chart is what happened the moment we were born and encodes the accent that was created within us.  That part is unchanging.  We change, but where we started does not.  Even if everything changes going forward, the current position of the planets will affect us differently than we used to think, but we will have started where we started, no matter how far we’ve traveled.

Anyway – just my 2 cents on the subject!  Astrology is still working just fine.  It’s been around for ages and something leads me to believe it’ll be around for a few more…