Zodiac clock, Bracken House, London, England.
According to a 2012 survey by Xtra Astrology and Cafe Astrology, 33% of Americans believe in astrology. This figure isn’t all that surprising, as for many years people have been reading their horoscopes in newspapers, magazines, and now on various websites. Those horoscope columns are written in very general terms to apply to everyone who shares the same Sun sign, which refers to the zodiac sign the Sun was in on the day you were born.
Meet Linda Kaye, astrologer.
Linda Kaye is a professional astrologer based in northern California. She received a B.A. in astrological studies from Kepler College in 2005.
What often happens, though, is people get frustrated when their Sun sign doesn’t describe them to exact detail, or their horoscope for a particular day turns out to be completely inaccurate. That frustration can lead to skepticism, and sometimes even mockery, of a science once studied by Galileo and Isaac Newton.
They are right to feel frustrated, however, because astrology is more than Sun signs. Western astrology—the type of astrology used in North American newspapers, magazines, and online to create daily and monthly horoscopes—uses the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 10 planets in the solar system, and how the signs and planets come together and connect with each other to explain personality traits, life experiences, and the world around us. By using your birth month, day, year, time and location to construct a birth chart, you can discover much, much more about your unique astrological profile. And you’ll finally understand why your daily horoscope doesn’t always make sense.
Linda Kaye explains why some people may misunderstand astrology and how it works.
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Before we dig in further, let’s look a little closer at the history of astrology. What we now think of as modern-day Western astrology has roots in ancient Mesopotamia, often referred to as “the cradle of civilization.” Mesopotamian scholars studied mathematics and astronomy, and combined that knowledge to develop an organized system of astrology.
By about 750 BC the Mesopotamians were master mathematicians and astronomers. They had mapped the entire sky, developed an 18 sign zodiac and were able to accurately calculate the future positions of the planets and eclipses. They had divided the ecliptic into 360° and attributed 60 minutes to each degree and 60 seconds to every minute of a degree. - Hamish Saunders, "A Brief Overview of the History of Western Astrology."
Thanks to Alexander the Great, the Mesopotamian study of astrology spread to Egypt and Greece. The Egyptian calendar, which was based on the rising and setting of constellations and stars, was combined with the Mesopotamian zodiac (which had shifted to a 12-sign zodiac around 600 BC) and Greek philosophy to create horoscopic astrology. This new type of astrology was much more focused on the individual. Personalized natal or birth charts could now be calculated to show the placement of the planets within the signs at the time of someone’s birth. Horoscopic astrology would go on to become the foundation of what we know as modern Western astrology.
Meet Snippet author and student of astrology Corinne Litchfield.
In this Snippet, we’ll look at:
Corinne defines Western tropical geocentric astrology, the focus of this Snippet.
Western tropical geocentric astrology uses the earth as the center (geocentric) and the solstice and equinox points in the sky (tropical).
Before we can learn about the signs and planets, it’s important to learn about the methods and systems that astrology uses for categorizing them.