Saturday, July 5, 2014

What's this Sun-Sign business?

Your Sun-sign - sometimes called 'star-sign' - is the section of the ecliptic through which the Sun is passing at the time of your birth. This is for convenience called by the name of the constellation which occupied that space over two thousand years ago, though the sign no longer completely matches its original zodiac sign. Now seen  by the geneal public as probably the most important astrological consideration, the idea of the 'Sun-sign' dates from 1930; before then, traditionally, the Ascendant or Rising-sign had been considered the more significant of the two. The Sun-sign was thought to portray the hidden personality - that part of one's personality know, if at all, only by one's partner or intimate friends - while the Ascendant showed the outward and obvious personality traits.

Sun-sign astrology - in which the sign occupied by the Sun at the time of birth is the sole factor used to describe a person - began effectively in 1930 with a newspaper column in the English Sunday Express newspaper, when the astrologer R. H. Naylor was commissioned by the editor to write an article examining he birth-chart of Princess Margaret, who had been born on 21 August. This provoked considerable interest, and Naylor was invited to write a series of articles. In the first of the series, published on 5 October 1930, Naylor wrote that British aircraft were likely to be in danger. On the day of publication it was announced that the airship R-101, en route to India with a distinguished group of passengers, had crashed in France with 48 fatalities. Not unnaturally, the newspaper capitalized on Naylor's apparent prediction, he was given much increased space, and soon became the first nationally-known astrologer. Naylor realised quickly that he should find a way of involving all his readers, and since everyone knew the date of his or her birth, he simply published a list of the dates when the Sunpassed through each Zodiac sign, and wrote twelve paragraphs, one for each of them. Within a very short time, people began asking each other 'What's your sign?' and there began the overwhelming interest in astrology which created a number of astrologer millionaires.

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