Aries: the sign is in your chart too

“Aries? That has nothing to do with me, I was born in October.” The sentence is understandable and wrong all the same. A birth chart does not hold one sign, it holds all twelve. Your birthday tells you only which of them the Sun stood in. So Aries is in your chart too – at a particular place, and that place can be found.

All twelve are there, only in different places

Have a birth chart worked out for you and you see it at once: the sheet carries twelve sign names, not one. None of them is missing, none appears twice. Your birthday settles one thing only, where the Sun sits. How the twelve are spread across your chart is decided by something else.

That something else is the time of birth. Every chart has a second layer of twelve fields, each of them in charge of an area of life: home, work, partnership, public role. These fields depend on the place and on the minute of your birth, while the signs keep their fixed order. Two people born on the same day but eight hours apart have the same twelve names in a wholly different distribution. And out of that comes the question at issue here: which field picks up the Aries colouring in your case?

Where it sits in your chart

The quickest way to read this off is a drawn chart: the circle of signs on the outside, the numbered houses within. You look for Aries on the rim and check which number faces it further in. Without a drawing to hand, the ascendant takes you further: the point at which the zodiac rose over the horizon in the east at your birth. It opens the first house, and from there the usual order of the signs runs on.

If Aries stands at the beginning of the first house, you have an Aries ascendant: you take up new things briskly and come across as more decisive than you feel inside. If it falls on the tenth house, that pace shows where people see you at work. If it lies on the fourth, home is where matters get tackled, argued over and settled again.

One peculiarity comes with this: in the common house systems the houses are of unequal size, so a sign can lie wholly inside one house without marking its beginning. It is then called intercepted, and it speaks more quietly. It has not disappeared.

Mars shows where the trail leads

That is only half the work done. Like every sign, Aries has a planet of its own, and that planet is Mars. To understand what the Aries stretch is up to in your case, you therefore look up where Mars stands; what this celestial body means at all is set out in the overview of the planets. The craft rule behind it: the house holding Aries says where the drive starts, the position of Mars says where it arrives.

An example. Aries on the sixth house, the field of daily work, and Mars in the ninth, the field of study and foreign parts: the restlessness then starts in the working day and looks for its goal in examinations, travel or a new subject. Sentences of that kind are not predictions but readings, and they can be checked against a life as it has been lived.

Four weeks that concern everyone

For the second way in you need no calculated chart. At the start of spring – in Central Europe currently 20 March in most years – the Sun enters Aries and stays there a good four weeks. In that time it runs through the Aries stretch of every chart, yours included, wherever it happens to lie.

Something can be made of this without having to believe anything. In those weeks take up a single matter you have been putting off for months, and start it instead of planning it further. Write down the date. When you look back in the summer you know two things: whether starting came easier to you then than it did in November, and how you fared with keeping it going. That is the more uncomfortable question.

And if you are an Aries yourself

Then your Sun falls into this field – a strong pointer, but a single one. The two ways in above hold for you just the same: in your chart too Aries lies in a particular house, and in your chart too Mars stands somewhere. Anyone who knows both gets beyond the sign description that is the same in every magazine. What else the rising sign marks, and how you work it out for your place of birth, is set out under ascendant.