Change Your Stars?
The New Zodiac is the Old Zodiac

by Lisa Poirier

In January 2011 a sea of Facebook stati cried out in dismay over changing zodiac signs appeared after a newspaper article about a 13th sign and shifting the old sign dates was published in the Star Tribune. Much like the 2000 Presidential election causing the American public to learn about the existence of the Electoral College, this article was the event that taught the western world that there is more than one zodiac.

This article introduced a 13th zodiac sign, Ophiuchus, the "serpent bearer". A lot of people thought this was a brand new sign, but it just was never a part of the zodiac system that they follow in the west. Those that had never heard of this sign before follow a zodiac system called the Tropical Zodiac, while those that are familiar with Ophiuchus follow the Sidereal Zodiac.

The Tropical Zodiac is the most popular zodiac system in the west, whereas Sidereal Zodiac appears most often in the East.

The Babylonians started the zodiac in the early 1st millennium B.C.E. Babylonian astronomers divided the ring of constellations along the ecliptic, the path of the sun across the celestial sphere over the year, into twelve. Each month was assigned a constellation, based on the location of the sun at the spring equinox, which was Aries. This caused Aries to be noted as the first astrological sign.

Over the past 3000 years, earth's wobble has caused the stars to no longer be in the same spot.

Greek astronomers began to use Babylonian star charts in the 4th century BC, which eventually lead to adopting some of their astrological system and zodiac. Ptolemy, a Roman astronomer living in Egypt, and the Greeks were instrumental in rationalizing the planets, Houses, and signs of the zodiac. They set their function and it has not changed very much since. These were defined three centuries after Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes, but Ptolemy chose to ignore this fact and adopted the tropical coordinate system, which ignored the idea of a fixed celestial sphere.

Ptolemy's ideas lead to the astrological tradition practiced in the west, also known as the Tropical Zodiac.

The Tropical Zodiac is based on the season in which the sun rose in each star sign. In short, the Tropical Zodiac is more concerned with the relationship between the earth and the sun, rather than the earth and the stars.

This relationship means that the Tropical Zodiac is not affected by the precession of the equinoxes, which is the change in the earth's alignment in the universe due to the wobble earth has because of gravity.

On the other side of the globe though, Tropical Zodiac is criticized and Sidereal astrology is revered.

Sidereal astrology was born out of a Indian and Greek culture mingling in the 2nd to 1st centuries BC. As a result, Tropical and Sidereal Zodiac are similar, but not identical.

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