The 12 Zodiac Signs

The twelve zodiac signs are not personality types. They are 30-degree arcs of the ecliptic, the apparent path the Sun traces across the sky over a year, and each arc has a centuries-old tradition of meaning attached to it. In traditional Western astrology, the chart suggests that the sign the Sun occupied at your birth describes the core identity you are growing into. Hellenistic astrologer Chris Brennan, in his exhaustive Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, traces the twelve-sign system to Babylonian sources as early as the 5th century BCE, formalized through the Hellenistic synthesis between roughly 100 BCE and 200 CE. The signs we use today are essentially unchanged from what Vettius Valens and Ptolemy described.

Each sign is described by three structural variables, in my practice with clients I always teach these first. Element, fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius), earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn), air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces), describes what kind of energy the sign is. Modality, cardinal (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), fixed (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius), mutable (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces), describes how the sign moves. Ruler, the classical planet that governs the sign, describes the deeper appetite at the heart of the placement.

Modern psychological astrologer Liz Greene, in Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, reminds us that signs describe tendencies rather than verdicts. According to Robert Hand in Planets in Transit, the most accurate way to read a sign is to listen for the placement underneath, your Sun sign is only one of ten planetary positions in your birth chart, and a single sign rarely tells the whole story. To get the full picture, generate your free birth chart below, then return here to explore any sign in depth.