An Introduction to the Signs (and a Very Brief History of Astrology)
Lesson 1: Learning Astrology Series
Hi Everyone,
If you started a journal practice, I hope it is going well. As we progress in learning astrology, it will be a good source to draw on to grow your understanding of and familiarity with the archetypes. Once we’ve established a good foundation in the basics, you can use your journal entries to gain insight into how the archetypes manifest in your life.
To start building those foundations, in this lesson, I want to give you a (very) brief history of astrology and introduce you to the signs. At the end, I provide some optional assignments that are meant as suggestions for ways you can go about learning the basics presented here if you don’t already know them. I hope they are helpful.
If you have any questions, please ask in the comments. If you are a subscriber and prefer to use the chat, I will be opening up a thread there shortly after posting this article.
Brief History of Astrology
For this brief history, I am relying on the The Astrology Podcast video, The History of Astrology: From Ancient to Modern Times.1
Astrology is a discipline that goes back at least a few millennia. Current understanding is that the form of astrology I and many other Western astrology students and professionals use, known as Western tropical astrology, has its roots in Mesopotamia, going back to somewhere between 1500 - 2000 BCE. At that time, astronomers began noting events that occurred on Earth and how they correlated to what was happening in the sky.2
Over time, the basic form of the tropical astrology practiced today in the West was formulated, eventually coming together in the complete form used by Western tropical astrologers today.3 This complete form was formulated in Greece during the Hellenistic period around the turn of the first millennium.4
Nuts and Bolts of the Practice
This form of astrology is made up of four basic building blocks.5 To that list, I add the wheel because the wheel is the arena in which all the other pieces are found or take place. All together, the five pieces are:
the wheel
the planets
the signs
the houses
the aspects
The first step in learning astrology is to understand what each of these building blocks is. The woman from whom I first learned astrology used the analogy of a play to describe them. In this analogy, the planets are the actors, the signs are the costumes the actors wear, and the houses are the stages on which the action takes place.
Continuing the analogy, we can say that the aspects represent the relationships and types of interactions between the actors, or planets, and the wheel itself represents the time and space in which the whole play, including all the different sets, or houses, takes place.
Not everyone uses this metaphor, but it is a good one to get you started.6
The Signs
There are twelve signs in the astrological zodiac. They are:
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces
As you can see, the names of the signs are the same names as some of the constellations in the sky. But, while they share the same names, they are not the same thing. Where the names of the constellations designate star groups in the sky, the names of the signs designate specific times of year, with each sign corresponding to about one month of time.
The signs, however, do not line up with our calendar months. Instead, they align with the seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, for example, the start of Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, aligns with the Vernal Equinox, which initiates Spring. From this starting point, it remains in effect for about 30 days, or for about one third of Spring. The next sign, Taurus, picks up where Aries leaves off and spans the middle third of Spring. Gemini then starts where Taurus ends and continues for the final third of the Spring season.
Next comes Cancer. It starts where Gemini leaves off, which is the point where Spring shifts to Summer. This transition point is marked by the Summer Solstice. Thus, Cancer begins at the time of the Summer Solstice and spans the first third of Summer. Leo and Virgo follow in turn, each spanning one third of Summer. And so on.
We’ll end with two tables. The first is a table showing the seasonal correlations for all the signs:
The second is the same table with the dates, as given by Wikipedia, added for each sign.7 Although the signs do not begin and end on exactly the same dates every year, they always begin and end within a day or two or so of a standard date range:
So there you have it, the first step in learning astrology. Next week, we’ll take a look at the archetypes and symbols for the signs. But, this week, I want to stop here. I did not know that the signs were not the same as the constellations until about 20 years into my learning journey with astrology. When I finally realized it, it threw me for a pretty big loop. So I want to establish this understanding first and give you some time to absorb it if it is new to you. Also, just learning the sign names, order, and dates, if you don’t already know them, will help to decrease insecurity and confusion as you continue to learn because you will feel solid in these pieces.
To help you establish this foundation if you haven’t already, below are a couple of assignments you can do. (And, even if you have a solid foundation, they might help make it even stronger.)
Assignment (Recommendations)
I have included three assignments. They are optional and I have included them in case they might be helpful for you in your efforts to learn the basics of astrology. The first assignment, which is in two parts, is about learning the signs. The second assignment is about familiarizing yourself with the history of astrology. And the third assignment, meant as an extra, is about noting how many days each sign covers. I include a video showing how you can use a Notion database to calculate this number for each sign.
Assignment 1: Learning the Signs
Part A
Using the tables above, as you walk through the week, notice which season you are in, which part of the season (beginning, middle, or end), and which sign aligns with that part of the season. Notice the quality of the Sun, its angle, the quality of the air, the general feeling in the air - not in terms of the human tragedies that are happening, but the Earth itself. Sometimes, when things are crazy, I notice that I can’t tune into the quality of the day. But then there’s a break in the human craziness and I can.
I’m writing this article in early February, the middle part of Winter, the time of Aquarius. It is relatively mild for this time of year, but still on the cold side and dry. The quality of light in the sky has been remarkable, the feeling of a clear shift from when the days were getting shorter to when they were getting longer. The quality of energy in the air has changed, too. Things feel brighter, while at the same time, more peaceful and tranquil. What I’m noticing is not about the human world, but about the quality of time and space available to us. I dream a world that allows all of us to be in touch with the Earth’s embrace every day, to not be forced into distraction and survival mode because of human confusion.
Part B
Take time to familiarize yourself with the following:
the names of the zodiac and their natural order
the season, and part of the season, each sign falls in
the general dates that each sign covers8
To understand why I suggest the exercise I do for Part B (introduced and explained after the next section), I first need to talk about the idea of body-first learning.
Body-First Learning
I learned recently that, in the Montessori approach to learning, children begin learning with their body. When children learn to write, for example, they begin with body-based exercises like tracing letters with their finger and playing with materials where they use their finger and thumb to pull objects out of a slot. Gradually, they progress to writing, not aware they are doing so.9
Since reading about this approach, I have begun to revisit my own astrology foundations, incorporating finger writing and finger drawing activities. When I do these activities, it feels like my body is being given nourishment. It drinks the activity up and it feels like I am building a more sound foundation.
When I reflect on why this approach feels nourishing, my mind sees a baby engaging with their world. When they first start learning, they do so by using their body to interact with their environment. Also, I think about how the brain sits atop the body. Literally and metaphorically, perhaps, we can say that the body is a foundation for the brain. Thus, using our bodies may provide us with a stronger, more sound knowledge foundation. I also notice that learning in this way feels less taxing on my brain.
Learning Suggestions
Suggestion for Learning the Signs
If you want to try an experimental body-first approach to learning the signs, try starting with finger writing the names of the signs. You don’t necessarily have to see the results of what you write, so you can use any surface - a desk top, a table top, the floor, etc. In fact, I prefer to start with one of these options.
But, you can also try an online drawing board that let’s you draw with your finger. A free one that I use is sketchpad.io. If you decide to use it, when you land on the page, just click on the “+” icon and choose the canvas you want. Then begin drawing, or writing with your finger, the names of the signs. It helped me most when I wrote one sign per canvas, but play around and see what works best for you.
Suggestion for Learning the Dates
Once you have the order of the signs down, focus on the dates. I didn’t know the exact general dates, instead relying on a rough estimate of each sign starting around the 20th of its respective month. To help me learn the more precise, but still general, dates, I first used pen and paper because it wasn’t possible to write everything on the drawing board. In hindsight, I wish I had used the drawing board right from the start as using pen and paper was more taxing on my brain.
Going back to the exercise the next day, I realized that the trick to using the online board approach was to create a different canvas for each season. Thus, I would recommend doing that if you want to use a finger writing approach to learning the dates.
Assignment 2: History of Astrology
If you get the sign names, order, seasons, and dates down, consider watching the first 30 minutes of The Astrology Podcast video, The History of Astrology: From Ancient to Modern Times. The entire video is 02:40:49. If you don’t know astrology, the rest of the video will probably overwhelm you, so I recommend just focusing on the first 30 minutes for now.
Assignment Extra
I got curious about the number of days per sign given the varying start and end dates, so wanted to see if calculating the number of days gave me any information. It did. If you’d like to do this for yourself, you can just go through each sign and add up the number of days in your head using a calendar. I did that initially but am terrible with numbers and counting and my answers weren’t making sense, so I created a database in Notion to do it for me. Below is a video showing you how you can create a database for yourself that will count the number of days per sign.
Thank you!
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References
Brennan, Chris [The Astrology Podcast]. (2020, November 28). The history of Astrology: from ancient to Modern times [Video]. YouTube.
Kent, April Elliott. (2015, Apr 15). Astrological Grammar. April Elliott Kent’s Big Sky Astrology. Retrieved February 8, 2024, from https://bigskyastrology.com/astrological-grammar/#:~:text=Planetary%20movements%20are%20astrology's%20verbs,Today%2C%20Mercury%20will%20aspect%20Pluto.
Lillard, Angeline Stoll (2007). Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius (Updated Edition). Oxford University Press, Inc.
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, January 9). Western astrology. Wikipedia. Retrieved February 7, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_astrology
Resources
Credit
Notes
See Brennan.
Ibid., timestamp: 00:00:00 - 00:07:40.
Ibid., timestamp: 00:07:44 - 00:27:55.
Ibid., timestamp: 00:26:10 - 00:27:00
Ibid., timestamp: 00:26:10 - 00:27:00
For a analogy using the parts of speech, see Kent’s article, Astrological Grammar.
See Wikipedia contributors. Note that the dates in the Wikipedia article are a little different than the dates on the image thumb for the article. (The full-size image is included at the end of the article.) Other sources, also, might have slightly different dates. Feel free to use the dates given on the image, or the dates from another source. If they are in the ballpark of the dates of the Wikipedia article, they should be fine to use as a baseline. The object at this time is to establish a baseline set of dates that you can refer to in your mind and with which you can compare dates from year to year. As you compare them over time, you may decide you want to adjust your baseline dates.
I say general dates because, from year to year, some dates may vary by a day or two.
See Lillard, pp 22 - 28.