As if the news of Pluto’s demotion from planet status wasn’t enough, now to rub salt in the wound, you might have been reading the wrong horoscope all of your life.
The release of “new” claims that zodiac signs recently changed due to the Earth’s rotation has caused a widespread identity crisis and left many feeling betrayed and abandoned by their sun sign; this article may help to set the record straight.
First off, although the rumors are true, they’re old news.
“You have been misled by an old story that recycles every several years by astronomers,” said Tucson Astrologers’ Guild Vice President Matthew Lauten. “Astrologers are well aware of the fact of precession. That is, the astrological zodiac wheel does not align exactly with the astronomical sky in the modern age.”
The Earth’s movement in relation to the sun has been well known by astrologers and astronomers for centuries. The Earth’s rotation is similar to the wobbling of a top, except this top spins around only once every 26,000 years, according to Stephen Pompea of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).
While it is true that the Earth’s wobbling caused the zodiac sign dates to shift, it happened well before this lifetime. Today, the Earth’s axis points at the North Star, but it was not always the North Star, according to NOAO Deputy Director Robert Blum.
“For your lifetime, the axis will always point close to the North Star, Polaris,” Blum said. “But 13,000 years from now, the axis will point very much in a different direction in the sky.”
Due to precession, or the wobbling of Earth on its axis, things have changed. The recent horoscope hang-up has caused many people to question astrology in its entirety.
“When you look up in the sky there’s a lot of stars, but there are no zodiac signs there,” Pompea said. “That’s our [human] invention, to connect the dots and make constellations, and it’s our invention to try to draw lines and say ‘that’s a sign.’”
So what do our zodiac signs really mean? If you ask an astronomer, you will likely be told that horoscopes are completely arbitrary.
“It’d be kind of like if I told you that what kind of a person you are will depend on what brand of airplane is taking off the moment you were born,” Pompea said. “If American Airlines was taking off you will be a very patriotic American, you might want to join the armed forces. Would you believe it? Would you believe that everybody who was born at that moment would all be the same?”
When people began casting horoscopes almost 3,000 years ago, a person’s zodiac sign was determined by what constellation the sun was in on the day they were born, Pompea said.
Contrary to Pompea’s explanation, Lauten said the zodiac is simply signs, not constellations.
“The zodiac used in astrology is based on the seasons of the year on Earth,” Lauten said. “The ancient astrologers’ main job was to mark the turning of the seasons. There were no clocks or calendars back then. It is nothing more than that.”
Every 70 years, all of the stars in the sky move approximately one degree, Lauten said. Astrologers explain the recent zodiac confusion a little differently than astronomers.
“The confusion comes from the fact that these signs at one time, the time of ancient Greece’s apex, roughly coincided to constellations starting with Aries on the spring equinox,” Lauten said. “That is no longer the case.”
In 22,000 years, Lauten said, the stars of Aries will be realigned with the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and it will once again be “the Age of Aries.”
Now that you have the facts, whether you change your personality to fit your new zodiac sign or pretend the whole thing never happened is up to you.
