You Are Not Your Sun Sign

In my last post, I evaluated the Sun in astrology. This essay is not meant to diminish that praise, but to place it in context. The Sun is an immensely powerful astronomical entity. It is a great ball of fire that provides the heat and light necessary to sustain life. It protects the other planets from radiation with its heliosphere. And it is a fixed center of mass around which everything else revolves.

The Sun in your birth chart is showing your potential to rise to your most inspired, consistent, and dignified source of power. It is one of the highest spiritual energies you can access in this lifetime. If you do, you will be able to act selflessly and tirelessly, according to your greatest principles. However, the path to reaching it is not without sacrifice. You must give up a lot of unnecessary habits to become who you are in the highest sense. And it burns. It hurts because the Sun wants to purge the impure aspects of your identity. As the illuminator and liberator, it pitilessly sets all our delusions ablaze. Accessing its power requires you to stop seeing in the mirror only this small animal, with its name and socially sanctioned roles. You will not feel like yourself.

In astrology, among the classical planets the Sun is only the most powerful. But it shares its light with the Moon as well as the planets from Mercury to Saturn. All these entities are storing subtle reflections of your visible karma. You experience them in twelve psychological filters—the signs—over twelve concrete life experiences—the houses. This is the ‘Wheel in the Sky,’ as the Journey song goes. Every 24 hours, all twelve signs pass over you in succession.

Which sign corresponds to which house? At the time you were born, one of these signs was coming into view on the East horizon. This is called the rising sign or ascendant. In Sanskrit the word used is lagna, which means ‘intersection.’ The lagna is literally the intersection between Heaven and Earth—and that’s what you are too as an incarnated being, borrowing the power of the Sun.

The rising sign is the first house, and the first house is the body. The body is a vehicle for experiencing life. Through life a personality develops, and we give the personality a name like ‘Jack’ or ‘Jill.’ The birth chart reveals the personality as the sum of planetary potentials. The planets are faculties of cognition and expression that are being developed through experience.

Experiences are being filtered through and organized in the first house. Your ability to learn and grow through experience depends on the amount of presence you show. The body is the part of you that is always present, but the dignity of the planets in your chart shows specifically which life lessons will be easy or difficult to learn. In the Vedic astrological perspective, the ultimate purpose of this life is to gather experience and evolve into a complete expression of the divine, full of self-knowledge and ready to share its power with the world.

As said in the last post, the Sun in your chart is showing perhaps the most powerful lesson you will learn in life. Wherever the Sun was when you were born, there will be a spotlight on that area of life. But the Sun can be anyplace in the sky relative to the ascendant. All things being equal, there’s an 11/12 chance that the Sun is not purifying your first house. That's why you have to know your birth time! An astrologer cannot in good faith say too much about who ‘Jack’ or ‘Jill’ is based on their Sun sign alone, nor the birth month that would indicate it.

A different sign passes the horizon every 2 hours. A Cancer ascendant with the Sun in Capricorn will experience and express that power very differently than a Virgo born only 4 hours later. We can say this about all the planets, each one a unique expression of who you are. But the limited expression is not the whole person, and the limited person is not the supreme self.

If you are like many astrology lovers who in good faith try to shape their identities around their Sun signs, you may sometimes get a sense that you're fitting a square peg into a round hole. You can’t look at the Sun directly, and conversely you need the other planets to reflect its light through the various experiences and psychological filters. There are many reasons why Sun signs came to dominate mainstream Western astrology, but they are beyond the scope of this essay. The point is, if you desire to know how you embody the planets, you must start with the rising sign as a frame of reference. That's the person you believe yourself to be.

A professional astrologer who knows his principles can read your chart holistically. And all those principles are referring back to your ascendant, because that’s where the cosmos was flowing into the Earth when you were born. That sign is the filter you carry with you throughout life. The identity which contains it is sustained by the ruler of the solar system and must be purged away in order to return to that ruler. The Sun’s power is limitless, but it is ever patient and focused on just one area of life, which is not the whole of your life. To identify with it alone is only to limit yourself further. Because you are not your Sun sign. You are greater than the sum of all planets combined.

Are you ready to learn more about your ascendant and how you relate to all planets and signs? Book a reading now!