Fourpillars

Ask a Western astrologer for your sun sign and an Indian astrologer for the same, and you will usually get different answers — typically one sign apart. Neither has made a mistake. They are using different zodiacs. This is not a minor technical footnote. It is a disagreement about what the zodiac fundamentally is , and it has gone unresolved for roughly two thousand years. For chart components generally, see our introduction to Western astrology . The Cause: Precession The Earth's axis wobbles. Not quickly — one full circuit takes about 25,800 years — but steadily, and the effect accumulates. The consequence is that the position of the spring equinox drifts slowly backward against the background stars, at roughly one degree every seventy-two years. Hipparchus is credited with identifying this in the second century BCE, and it has been understood ever since. When the zodiac was standardised in Babylon around the fifth century BCE, the spring equinox fell near the beginni...