Zodiac Signs of Litopia

[Katie-Ellen]

Let's check out the Litopia zodiac zoo. (The word zodiac mean 'the wheel of the animals'...Libra. the newest sign (Roman), being the only non-animal sign of the zodiac)

One might logically suppose these will/should be evenly distributed in any sufficiently large sample. Not so. Not even in the wider general populations. There are more Virgo born people than any other sign in the northern hemisphere, and fewer Capricorn and Aquarius subjects. There have been sound seasonal historical reasons for this, to do with scarcity or availability of food resources, but even now, in the days of supermarkets, it persists.

 

[Emily]

I have a feeling us Taurean may top the poll...

 

[Katie-Ellen]

You, me, Rachel, Jonny.....it would be interesting to find out ze wider picture.

 

[KateESal]

Taurus/Virgo neck and neck.

Earth signs, I believe?!

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Taurus, Fixed Earth

Virgo, Mutable Earth

 

[CageSage]

I need to have two - cusp of Virgo/Libra (a Christmas gift?).

The cusp thing runs in the family: one born 22 March, one on 24 May, one 22 June, one 24 Dec, one 22 Nov, etc. (I may have missed some.)

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Have changed it to allow 2 votes for people who really are right on the cusp. But perhaps you identify more readily with one than the other.

 

[CageSage]

Have changed it to allow 2 votes for people right on the cusp. But perhaps you identify more easily with one than the other.

Depends on the day ...

thanks.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Archetypes of course. Just looking at the seasonal archetypes. And to every sign its own archetypal writing persona.

 

[Barbara]

I've just realised, I know 4 people who are all born on the 1st of May. Only one is a litopian, so that's probably not helpful.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Can you believe I typed 'where' not 'were', and it won't let me edit that bit, to correct it? Gahhhh...Virgo ascendant not happy.

 

[Hannah F]

I'm on the Aquarian side of the Aquarian-Pisces cusp (Feb 15). (Air and Water) Might be why I'm such a dreamer and am drawn to writing and Fantasy.

 

[Pamela Jo]

Ides of March. March 11th. Pisces. Someone did my whole horoscope once out of curiosity. He identified 7 year cycles of good and bad with good luck pulling me out of the slump. Kind of accurate. I did my sons online for his 16th Bday. Weirdly identified swords in his future.

 

[E G Logan]

cusp of Virgo/Libra

Me, too. (I once shared a flat with two other Virgos and visitors used to say it was the most obsessively tidy place they'd ever been. Not super clean, but all the furniture lined up accurately.)

 

[Dorm Ant]

I think astrology is silly. How can the position of the planets at the moment of your birth affect anything? Surely that's all down to genetics, childhood, social status and sheer random circumstance, plus butterflies beating wings the other side of the world or some such chaos.

Needless to say, I am a Capricorn.

 

[izi 出久]

I think astrology is silly. How can the position of the planets at the moment of your birth affect anything? Surely that's all down to genetics, childhood, social status and sheer random circumstance, plus butterflies beating wings the other side of the world or some such chaos.

Needless to say, I am a Capricorn.

I'm also a skeptic. However, a friend who's generally (mostly) a rational engineer thinks there is possible truth to some shared characteristics based on magnetism / position of the Earth in respect to the sun (edit to add) during the span of fetal development. Not really about moment of birth. He has a grand old explanation I won't try to repeat here.

And I am a Sagittarius. And a monkey in Chinese horoscopes. Which have the same characteristics. So double dose of 'hold my beer' moments from me.

 

[izi 出久]

And our brains run on electrochemical pulses... and what is matter but electric pulses guided by electric fields created by magnetic fields? Or some shit like that.

 

[Dorm Ant]

If your mum was in labour for 18 hours on the last day of one sign flowing through into the first day of the next, what does that mean? What is the actual moment of birth? Aquarius and Capricorn couldn't be more different. If I had been a more difficult birth, I would have been a watery dreamer, rather than a hard nosed pragmatic goat (shudder).

Anyway, the main thing that rings my sceptical bell is not the ideal of powerful magickal forces of the universe, cos I respect those, it's the idea that the Earth is at the centre of things and the other planets revolve around it. Cos that's my understanding of what astrology is based on. It predates astronomy, which has blown that illusion away.

 

[izi 出久]

Anyway, the main thing that rings my sceptical bell is not the ideal of powerful magickal forces of the universe, cos I respect those, it's the idea that the Earth is at the centre of things and the other planets revolve around it. Cos that's my understanding of what astrology is based on. It predates astronomy, which has blown that illusion away.

Fair. He wasn't arguing for the characteristics prescribed in horoscopes. Only that people born around the same time are more likely to share certain personality traits.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Thoughtful comments. This thread was posted as a bit of fun. The sun signs are indeed a massive over simplification. It's a symbolic language based on the seasons, its interpretation works on historical and psychological correlation. codified into western or Tropical astrology by Ptolemy. He based the zodiac on arithmetic, 360 degrees divided slightly imperfectly by 12 into the signs we know today. Here arises much misunderstanding.

Astrology did once match up with the astronomy in a way it doesn't now, due to an effect called the precession or procession of the equinoxes- caused by the wobble of the earth. The signs used to line up in real time with the constellations as markers of events on the ground, and over many thousands of years, a database of historical correlations and precedents was established. Astrologers obviously did not have all the knowledge astronomy has now, as in every field of knowledge, the Hubble wasn't invented yet. But the Greeks knew fine well that the earth was round, worked out by mathematics. They also knew that the Earth went round the sun, but the rise of the Church put the mockers on heliocentrism in the middle ages, on pain of death. The Catholic Church was later more open to Copernicus in a way they had not been to Galileo, but Protestantism shut down it down again in the 17th century.

Kepler was both astrologer and astronomer, and urged the astronomy establishment not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to no avail, and the disciplines parted ways there.

Astrology is a cultural artifact. Writers work with symbols. Our sun sign can be seen as a symbol, an ancient, primal totem. It makes sense (or it used to make more sense before supermarkets) that a baby born in January has been conceived, gestated and arrives into a different environment than a baby born, say in midsummer. Different hours of daylight, different levels of vitamin D exposure, different foods available to the mother and so on. For the purpose of Litopia, and writing, astrology can be understood simply as a resource, as a database or codifying of images, symbols and archetypes lodged very deep down in the collective psyche- in both hemispheres, though we have different systems of astrology, the Tropical, the Vedic and the indigenous aboriginal, arising at different latitudes- different views of the skies.

The skies are full of stories, all seen from Earth. Great stories deal in archetypes. Poetic understanding.

 

[Bloo]

Don't believe on any of the zodiacs. Life experience informs much of who and what I am. Genetics play a small role. Lots of alcohol surely randomized a few neurons and made subtle contributions to my personality, as well.

I'm an Aries born in the year of the Monkey, FWIW.

And this thread has more whiskers than I do.

 

[Bloo]

And our brains run on electrochemical pulses... and what is matter but electric pulses guided by electric fields created by magnetic fields? Or some shit like that.

I wear magnetic bracelets to align the iron in my blood - one for each limb. They screw up the compass in my phone and my credit cards stopped working. Yet that's nothing compared to how much better I think I feel.

Besides, bracelets are a lot cheaper than an MRI.

 

[Pamela Jo]

If your mum was in labour for 18 hours on the last day of one sign flowing through into the first day of the next, what does that mean? What is the actual moment of birth? Aquarius and Capricorn couldn't be more different. If I had been a more difficult birth, I would have been a watery dreamer, rather than a hard nosed pragmatic goat (shudder).

Anyway, the main thing that rings my sceptical bell is not the ideal of powerful magickal forces of the universe, cos I respect those, it's the idea that the Earth is at the centre of things and the other planets revolve around it. Cos that's my understanding of what astrology is based on. It predates astronomy, which has blown that illusion away.

If it's electric impulses then the moment of birth is probably not as important as the other end of the stick. The diurnal cycles when you are in vitro. The seasonal foods available to your mother, the sunshine, her body temp. The link with time and seasons to the stars is clear. It wouldn't be the first time humans attributed empirical results to the wrong natural phenomenon. Maybe why the Asian horoscopes are different. It is more applied psychology. If you are raised to be a boar child, everything you do is seen as boar-ish then you are going to fit the description. Nurture more than nature.

 

[Bloo]

If it's electric impulses then the moment of birth is probably not as important as the other end of the stick. The diurnal cycles when you are in vitro. The seasonal foods available to your mother, the sunshine, her body temp. The link with time and seasons to the stars is clear. It wouldn't be the first time humans attributed empirical results to the wrong natural phenomenon. Maybe why the Asian horoscopes are different. It is more applied psychology. If you are raised to be a boar child, everything you do is seen as boar-ish then you are going to fit the description. Nurture more than nature.

Well...I'm a monkey, not a boar. Even so, I'm a bit boorish. I won't bore you with examples.

On another note, a significant minority of South Africans are Boer, no matter when they were born.

I'll let myself out now

 

[Katie-Ellen]

This poll was predicated on Tropical astrology of the northern hemisphere. The thing we call the zodiac is firstly a slice of sky 16 degrees deep, following the imaginary arc of the ecliptic, the annual trajectory of the sun as seen from Earth, 8 degrees above the ecliptic, eight degrees below it.

Once upon a time all mathematicians were also astronomers and astrologers. The Art of astrology arose over many millennia from the observation of natural phenomena, linking events on the ground with the map overhead till in time it became a massive database of directly observed correlations. This, despite the effects of the precession of the equinoxes due to the wobble of the earth. Many though not all astrologers way before Kepler, before the Enlightenment, even before the Greeks, understood via the triangulation of measurements of shadows etc that Earth was heliocentric.

Secondly, the zodiac (meaning 'wheel of life/living things'- the only non living sign is the scales of Libra, but even these double up as the claws of The Scorpion next door) represents an arithmetic construct and codification by Ptolemy in the second century AD/CE.

For our creative and imaginative purposes here on Litopia, the zodiac it represents a vast reservoir of cultural resources dating back way before the Sumerians and Akkadians, first arising in the civilizations on the 36th latitude which directed and prescribed the view of the skies from where they stood.

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia also have their own, sometimes related, sometimes different astrology based on the view of the skies from where THEY stood. They too have more than one system spanning Northern to Western to Southern Australia, and they relied on the appearance of certain constellations at particular points in the sky to know when to expect certain fish to arrive at given locations.

Ancient, historic and immediately practical applications aside, writers and artists deal not least, but first and foremost in the great archetypes. The currency of astrology is The Archetype. These span all cultures.. Astrology at the least, represents a library, an art gallery. Much of modern psychology is based upon it.

It's obviously not everyone's cup of tea. But it deserves a quiet nook in any artists or writers colony. Not a whiskers job. Or a tin hat job. It's just about imagery and associative thinking - creativity- at least for our purposes here on Litopia. Nothing to do with religion, superstition, faith or belief. No belief required.

 

[Hannah F]

and I am most definitely an Aquarian.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

You might be interested in this series based on Richard Tarnas's Cosmos and Psyche.

Episodes - Changing of the Gods

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

Let's check out the Litopia zodiac zoo. (The word zodiac mean 'the wheel of the animals'...Libra. the newest sign (Roman), being the only non-animal sign of the zodiac)

One might logically suppose these will/should be evenly distributed in any sufficiently large sample. Not so. Not even in the wider general populations. There are more Virgo born people than any other sign in the northern hemisphere, and fewer Capricorn and Aquarius subjects. There have been sound seasonal historical reasons for this, to do with scarcity or availability of food resources, but even now, in the days of supermarkets, it persists.

Sadly I missed this poll. I'm a Leo by the way (and proudly so). But I'm also a sceptic. My mum was too. She even wrote a sci-fi story (her only one) about astrology (sort of). It's one of my favourites of hers. You can read an extract of it here Child of the Dark Star

 

[CarolMS]

Pisces. That's me.

 

[Rachel Caldecott]

A Leo who describes herself as proudly? Hmm, perhaps a more humble moon sign?

Don't be silly... Me modest? What part of Leo don't you understand? We are perfect! Somewhere I have the original of this, but here is a photo of it from the net.