Remember hearing about Ophiuchus, the forgotten/disregarded/potentially re-instated 13th zodiac sign? I think I was in high school, or maybe college (or maybe both, since it seems to be a recurring news story!), when I read about the supposed astronomical upset of astrology. I found it mildly interesting at the time, but more because I was interested in constellations than horoscopes.
Turns out, though, my focus on the actual constellation wouldn’t have been right for an astrologer. While it’s true that your zodiac sign is understood loosely as “the sign the sun was in when you were born,” and technically the sun’s path (as we see it) does cross through the constellation Ophiuchus, that doesn’t actually mean much in tropical astrology. I think the confusion comes from mixed-up terminology. In tropical astrology, the system most folks in the West use, a zodiac sign isn’t an astronomical constellation; instead, the constellation is used as a symbol for what some astrologers call a “season.” The zodiac in astrology is like an ancient calendar, starting at the spring equinox with Aries. (I particularly enjoyed one article which, despite a very confusing beginning, went on to point out that “Ophiuchus has not been recently discovered.” Now, Ophiuchus was recently incorporated into sidereal or Vedic astrology to account for lost time in their astrological calendar, but that system isn’t the prevailing one in the US.)
I’ve been researching astrology for some ideas for merfolk culture — because star-gazing out in the open ocean must be pretty good, right? 🙂 But this sign/season thing makes me think that astrology is a lot more about what’s happening on earth than things in the sky. It seems more like a language of symbolism than anything else — like a very early fore-runner to MBTI and Enneagram personality type tests. And given how much early alchemists used astrology, maybe that shouldn’t come as such a surprise!
Selected Sources
For every “fact” about astrology on the internet, there’s half a dozen people with a dozen different opinions ready to disagree. I’ve found books and podcasts (Astrology Bytes is an interesting one with very short episodes) are a safer route for research. That said, Libra Moon Astrology has a neat webpage describing the zodiac signs in terms of seasons. There’s also a rather enthusiastic description of tropical and sidereal astrology at Trusted-Astrology.com.
