A Message from the Stars

Even though we see the stars come out each night when the weather is clear, and perhaps even feel at times that we can reach out and touch these tiny twinkling lights, they are farther away than we can imagine. Though we may know about familiar bright stars such as Spica or Aldebaran or Antares that decorate the “vault of the heavens,” their use in astrology is somewhat limited, and perhaps also somewhat mysterious to many students of astrology, so let’s take a look at how those tiny points of light in the heavens can add a new dimension to a horoscope.

Before going too far, we have to take care of a necessary technical point, which is that the “fixed” stars are only fixed in relation to each other, and do not move in the way the Sun, Moon, and planets do. Stars are not, however, fixed in terms of the equinoxes and solstices that mark the four seasons, and which are the basis for the zodiac used in this magazine and in the Western world in general. These points that mark the seasons move backward in relation to the stars (called the “precession of the equinoxes”), so over time the position of a particular star in our Western zodiac will move forward by an average of 1.25 degrees a century. The positions of the stars given in this article are correct to the