The sun sign

“What star sign are you?” means the position of the Sun. It is worth knowing why it was this factor, of all of them, that became famous — the reason has nothing to do with how telling it is.

Why the Sun in particular

Because no time of birth is needed for it. The Sun stays in a sign for a month; the date is enough.

The ascendant needs the birth time to the minute, the Moon to the hour. No newspaper column can be built on that. And that is exactly where sun sign astrology began: in the daily papers of the 1930s.

What the Sun stands for

In classical interpretation: the living, the centre, the direction a life runs in. Not character — that is a later shift.

And what decides is not the sign alone but its condition there: is it dignified? angular? does its dispositor see it? A Sun in Leo on the midheaven describes something quite different from a Sun in Leo in the twelfth house.

What the sun sign alone cannot do

A chart is made up of seven planets, the ascendant and twelve houses. The sun sign is one of those details.

Two people with the Sun in Scorpio, one of them with a Libra ascendant and Venus dignified, the other with a Capricorn ascendant and Saturn angular, have almost nothing in common — and every Scorpio description fits one of the two at best.

And the borderline cases

The Sun changes sign at a particular moment, not on a date, and that moment shifts from year to year by as much as a day.

Anyone born at the changeover cannot work out their sun sign at all without a time of birth. The common talk of a “cusp” on which one is a little of both signs is a misunderstanding: the Sun stands in one sign or in the other, and the arithmetic says which.