Whether you have your horoscope sent to your phone every day, or are tired of hearing about your friends' horoscopes everyday, almost everyone knows their star sign. When your friend blames her emotional outbursts on being a cancer, for example, you know exactly what she’s talking about. It seems like every day you log into Facebook there’s a new Buzzfeed quiz claiming to be able to predict what your star sign will be in your next life, or which Marvel character your star sign should date. There are memes all over the internet with all kinds of lists and articles ranging from “The star signs as pictures of Oprah holding fresh crops” to “The star signs as kitchen utensils,” assigning arbitrary things to star signs in accordance with the character traits associated with each sign.
Everybody participates, even celebrities. Celebrities like Jaden Smith, who proudly announces he is a cancer in his song Weekend in Atlantic, to Nicki Minaj claiming sagittarius as her star sign in Drake’s "Make Me Proud," to "RuPaul’s Drag Race" season six finalist libra Adore Delano pictured above. And while it took a while for Apple to give us the taco and unicorn emojis, there has been an emoji for each star sign since the dawn of the iPhone. Astrology is everywhere. Often times, astrology is treated as both a science and a religion by its fanatical followers. So, what is astrology and why do we all want to believe in it so badly?
The earliest origins of astrology are believed to have come from Mesopotamia and Egypt, but there are so many different histories of astrology from around the world, spanning from China to Mesopotamia to the Western world. While it has such broad origins, we do know astrology's development has to do with the way ancient civilizations kept time using the stars. This makes sense, as there are twelve signs for the division of the year into twelve months.
Somehow, this developed into the belief that by tracing celestial events, one could predict terrestrial events, and that developed into predicting a person’s traits and significant life events based on where the sun and stars were when they were born, which determines their star sign. And there are all kinds of characteristics and iconography that come with a person’s star sign, like ruling planet of each sign, or whether or not your sign is an air, earth, fire, or water sign. Astrologists who write up our horoscopes use the position of the sun in juxtaposition with the different constellations to make their predictions, and will also use the positions of the different planets as well. For example, when Mercury is in retrograde, your horoscope might have some words of warning for you.
Sadly, since the creation of the twelve signs as we know them, the stars have shifted, not only potentially changing the birth-dates of each sign but also introducing the 13th sign, Ophiucus. Whether we like it or not, the astrology we have been following is actually outdated, and has been for years. As the stars change, the dates that belong to each sign change as well, so technically speaking we are not the signs we think we are. However, the "tropical zodiac," or the zodiac followed by the Western world, is fixed. Astrology is universally considered a pseudoscience by the academic and scientific communities, so changing the zodiac to reflect the current orientation of the stars around Earth isn’t exactly necessary. And though the shifts in the stars and sun due to Earth's rotation affect our daily horoscopes, in the "tropical zodiac," they are not going to affect which star signs we are. Regardless of whether or not astrology is scientifically sound, it’s fun to identify with a sign and have some words of encouragement or guidance from your horoscope for the day, and it’s certainly not going to hurt anything as long as no one takes horoscope advice to the extreme.
So if your birthday falls between August 23 and September 22 and you’re a diehard Virgo, there’s no need to have an identity crisis, the twelve sign model written up in tabloid magazines and newspapers across the country isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
PS-- if you were wondering how to tell if Mercury is in retrograde, there is a website.
