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Signs of the Zodiac

Sun Signs

So now to the all important pick-up line: "What’s your sign?" Most people who have the slightest interest in astrology, (or in pick-up lines), know that the sun signs run from the twenty-second of the solar month to the twenty-first of the next solar month. These are the signs that are most often associated with Horoscopes, especially those in the daily paper or the daily email that people check to receive hard to understand and usually ambivalent information about the current day or week. The sun sign is the sign that you answer when asked, "What’s your sign?" and what it means is that if you were born "a Sagittarius," you were born between the twenty-second of November and the twenty-first of December. This is defined as the period that the sun is "in" Sagittarius.
That is about the sum total of what the average layman knows about sun signs, and may be even more than you really wanted to know when you started reading this.
For the dates to occur with a complete and constant correlation with the solar calendar, we can safely assume that the signs of the zodiac are traveling at the same "speed" as the earth is around the sun, or to view it properly, we are traveling around the sun and the zodiac which are relatively stationery with regard to each other from our viewpoint.
Sun signs have always been a confusing topic, because they are the layman's introduction to astrology, and to preserve some small degree of believability in the expression of characteristics of people born in a given sun sign the attributes must allow for a wide variety. In the previous chapter I dealt with the characteristics associated with the various signs of the zodiac, and these are considered to be the characteristics of a subject born in that sun sign. There is, or was, a school of astrology which considered that while women were considered to be born in the same sun sign (by date) the characteristics of women born in any given sun sign would be read as the characteristics of the opposite sun sign, (one-hundred-eighty degrees away on the circle). This was to take into account that women and men are in so many ways the opposites of each other. Whether or not this is still done is unimportant, although you might consider that with role reversal and other non-gender bound behaviors today, it might not be a valid approach.
Also, please understand that the language of the Oracle, is such that the statement of the newspaper horoscope that "today is a good day to consider a new challenge" might be an indication that the best course of action would be not to take that new challenge after considering it.
Astrologers claim that you too are traveling through all the phases of the sun sign zodiac as you live your life. This is, of course, a result of your traveling along with the rest of us on this planet. It is also that our cycles do not necessarily conform to the cycles that are external to us. Your cycles do not necessarily conform to mine; nor do either of our cycles conform to some third person's cycles. There may be a caveat to this in that it is a known physiological fact that women who live in close contact for long periods of time tend to adjust their menstrual cycles so that they all match. This might argue that people who live in close proximity for long periods of time can and do match their astrological cycles to some degree.
The internal cycles that you go through are not perfectly timed, nor are they always in the same position with regard to all events in your life. What astrology can tell you about your life, as you live it is for the most part advice to help you find out where you are in your various life cycles, and what influences you might be under in an astrological sense. As I have pointed out before, all of the houses, signs, etc. are at best influences on your life. In addition, consider that all of the key words which I pointed out in the previous chapters are ambiguous at best. They can be pointing at your trait or away from it. Consider this: if you are a male, but are currently going through a specific issue in your life where the female aspects of your personality are being called to the forefront, wouldn't it be proper to view your astrological guidelines as though you were actually female?