Libra: a sign that needs a counterpart

Libra is the seventh of the twelve signs; the Sun stands in it from roughly 23 September to 23 October. It is hard to describe as long as there is only one person to look at. Everything that makes up this sign becomes visible only once somebody else is in the room.

What sets in the west

In a birth chart, the ascendant marks the place where something was coming up on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth. Exactly opposite, in the west, something was going down in the same minute, and that is where the seventh of the twelve houses begins. It is the one part of your own chart that you cannot look at without turning round. It is responsible for everything that a second person is part of.

As the seventh sign, Libra inherits that responsibility, and that explains why descriptions of it often sound oddly vague. They are not about a quality somebody carries around like a hair colour, but about a situation in which two people appear. Anyone looking for Libra in a life story finds it in the sentences where a second name turns up.

The second side of Venus

Venus is classically given two signs, Taurus and Libra, and the two halves of her territory lie a long way apart. In Taurus it is about what a person can have for themselves: a good meal, a fabric that feels pleasant, a garden bed that yields something. Nobody else is needed for that.

The Libra side is the other one. An affection that is returned; an arrangement both parties keep to; an understanding that nobody can produce alone. Things of that kind cannot be owned, only kept up, and they stop existing the moment one side walks out. Anyone with a lot of Libra in the chart works all day on things built that way, usually without calling it work. What the other celestial bodies stand for is set out on the Planets page.

How an opinion forms here

A Libra person often knows what they think only once somebody else has said something. That is readily taken for insecurity, but it is more of a working method: their own position takes its outline from someone else’s, the way a drawing only gets an edge from its background. As long as nobody contradicts, everything is equally valid, and that is exactly what feels uncomfortable.

Two practical things follow from this. If you want something from a Libra person, do not ask an open question. “Where would you like to eat?” is the hardest question you can ask; “Greek or Thai?” is answered in two seconds. And if you recognise yourself in this, say what you think early on when you are in company. After the third contribution you have three other people’s positions in your head to place yourself against, and your own has disappeared between them.

And when there is nobody there?

It gets interesting when this sign is left on its own. It finds itself a counterpart all the same, only an invented one. You hold the conversation in your head, you frame the answer to a reproach nobody has made yet, and you rewrite the message three times because you think you already know how it will land.

That is not useless, it has only one flaw: the invented counterpart never answers with a surprise. It says what you put in its mouth, and that is usually the sharpest thing it could say. What helps is trading it in for a real one — a question you actually ask instead of answering it for yourself. Two minutes of asking, experience shows, save half a night.

What looks like politeness from the outside is rarely mere form in this sign. It is the tool that keeps two views side by side for a while, without one of them having to be cleared away at once. How the other eleven signs are laid out is described on the Zodiac signs page.