The most common misconception is that astrology is all about “star signs”. Astrologers are regularly accosted at social gatherings by those who lay down the gauntlet and declare – guess what star sign I am! My usual repartee to that is that I do not do party tricks. However if the person appears sincere in their interest and has the facade of an above average intelligence quota, I may deem them worthy to receive the astrological explanation of why star signs are completely nonsensical.

The star referred to in contemporary magazine and newspaper columns is the Sun. All 7 of the traditional planets, including the Sun, move along the ecliptic through the sphere of the zodiac. This 360 degree sphere is divided into 12 sections of 30 degrees each. When you are born, every one of the 7 planets will be posited in one of the 12 signs, somewhere within its 30 degree parameter. Each planet represents a different facet of you as well as aspects of your life, and as we cannot detach our emotional nature from our physical body, nor our brain from our soul (although sometimes I do wonder about that), each planet is as important as the other in the assessment, and each one influences the other.

The luminaries (the Sun and Moon) and Mercury are vital in the assessment of manner and wit of the native, all representing different aspects of the mind, emotions and the soul, with the Moon and Mercury holding prime spot for indicators of the soul. The Sun is viewed as the symbol of the soul in its entirety, the core or essence of a person, and is quite difficult to define simply because what you are trying to define is an abstract concept.

Now planets are nouns and signs are adjectives, and these 12 adjectives each have a set of characteristics, but they do not have the fully fledged and inflated personalities allotted to them in modern astrology. They will be masculine or feminine, barren or fertile, mute or voiced and humane or bestial, and some are even maimed. Each sign is categorised by an element and by a mode or quality, which further adds to its characteristics. So the sign in which the Sun is posited will describe this one facet of a person to a (limited) degree. But, and this is where it goes horribly wrong, we are more than just our Sun – we have all the other facets that have to be taken into account and all of these contribute to the person in their entirety. These then need to be filtered through the temperament of the person and other factors, too numerous to mention here, need to be inter-woven into the psyche.

There is no “one size fits all” in astrology, a fact that should be quite obvious if we engage our brains and consider our individuality. Assessing someone by their Sun sign alone and making sweeping statements on that basis is equivalent to assessing a person based on their nationality – because we are South African we all voted for Jacob Zuma, we all like rugby and we all drink beer. So next time you attend a social function and discover that someone in your group is a (traditional) astrologer, rather impress them by telling them you are subscribed to the AORTA newsletter. *Grin*