The turn of the year: a date no planet knows

In the weeks between Christmas and the middle of January, horoscopes are talked and written about more than in all the rest of the year. Magazines clear double-page spreads, broadcasts take up the subject, and the question of what the coming year will bring is suddenly everywhere. Anyone who wants to know what astrology is in public life should look at these weeks — and notice first of all that nothing special is going on in the sky during them.

Nothing in the sky changes at midnight

The turn of the year is an agreement among people. What happens in the sky on New Year's Eve happens in just the same way on a night in the middle of November: the Moon moves on, the planets stand where they stood the evening before, and not one of them notices that a digit in the date has changed. The Sun runs through Capricorn in these days and does not reach Aquarius until around 20 January.

There are real breaks in this season; they simply fall elsewhere. Ten days before New Year's Eve comes the winter solstice, the shortest day, from which the light begins to increase again. The beginning that astrology itself counts lies further off still: its circle starts at the spring equinox, when the Sun enters Aries around 20 March. Chinese New Year, for its part, follows a new moon that falls no earlier than 21 January and no later than 20 February. Even 1 January is no ancient matter of course — in Europe the start of the year was placed on other days for centuries.

The calendar year is not an astrological unit

Something follows from this that is rarely said out loud: the stretch from 1 January to 31 December matches no single quantity in this field. Jupiter takes just under twelve years for the whole zodiac and so spends about a year in one sign — only it enters that sign when it enters it, and that is almost never New Year's Day. Saturn easily spans three calendar years with a single stay in one sign. And the personal year astrology works with does not begin in January but somewhere near a person's own birthday.

A preview of a calendar year is therefore a vessel set by the calendar, into which processes are sorted that began earlier and go on running afterwards. It only goes wrong when a year is described as though it had begun on 1 January and were settled on 31 December.

Why demand rises exactly then

The explanation lies not in the sky but in life. Around the turn of the year everything piles up that forces a reckoning: contracts run out, accounts fall due, resolutions are made, the days are short, and at the holiday table someone reliably asks how things are going for you.

Then there is the daily business of editorial offices. At the end of December pages have to be filled while little is happening. A year-ahead piece can be written weeks in advance, it deals with a period about which nobody can yet know anything, and it is certain to be read.

The argument has the same season

The objection appears to the same rhythm. Pieces on how many people take horoscopes seriously and what is to be made of that gather in exactly the same weeks — not because the question is more pressing in January, but because that is when the predictions are standing there for something to catch fire on. What increases at the turn of the year is therefore neither astrology nor scepticism, but the quantity of writing about both.

What is left of a year-ahead forecast

What is useful in the matter is what the calendar really does provide: a fixed date for pausing. That no celestial body marks it does not make it worthless — it works because everyone keeps to it at the same time. A carefully built forecast therefore names periods rather than years: the weeks in which a slow planet changes sign, the months in which a transit is running. Which readings relate to a particular period is set out under Horoscopes; how another culture places the start of its year, under Chinese astrology.