There are four main influences that give each of the Star Signs their characteristics: Those four influences are the constellation, the ruling planet, the ruling god or goddess and the astrological season the sign falls in. When you read about the origins behind your particular sign, I will refer to the time of year they represent, either talking about spring, autumn, winter or summer.

Today we are spread out around the globe, so if you live in the southern hemisphere, although the seasons are reversed and opposite to what they were when your Star Sign had its origins, you are still grounded in the origins of the time. This means that when I’m talking about spring, autumn, summer or winter, I’m talking about the astrological seasons. If you were born in the southern hemisphere, you would have been born in astrological spring, summer, autumn or winter, while the time of year you were born, would have been in the reverse season. For example Aries is the first sign of spring, but if you were born in the southern hemisphere, you were born at the start of autumn. That doesn’t mean that you’re an autumn sign, for the characteristics behind your star sign, were fused at their time of origin, which was in the northern hemisphere seasons.

In ancient times man sought to find answers that would explain his place in the universe. The stargazers of old are no different from today’s scientists, journalists or commentators or anyone we seek expert advice from. The knowledge our ancestors have passed down to us, leaves us free to explore more sophisticated levels of science, understanding and information. Now we’re leaving our planet in rockets and we have the Hubble space telescope to view stars that 7,000 years ago and until as recently as just a few hundred years ago, were only visible with the naked eye.

All ancient societies and cultures had their own form of Astrology, for Astrology (the science of the stars) is indeed the ‘oldest profession’.

Astrological records date back 7,000 years but it was the Greeks who gave us the form of Astrology that we recognise today. 5,000 years ago the 'zodiac' (circle of souls and animals) came into being. The zodiac is a 360 degree ecliptic (path or band) of just 9 degrees either side. The ancients imagined the zodiac (with the earth in the centre) as a giant band stretching around the sky. Around this band, with the earth in the centre, moved the planets, constellations, stars, Sun and Moon.

It was around this band in the heavens that the ancients saw the procession of not just the Sun, Moon, constellations and planets, but of the gods and the stories that they and the constellations that they moved through represented. These represented cycles that were repeated over and over, both annually, but also in much longer cycles, which over time formed patterns that were very predictable. Over time, people born at a certain time of year were associated with the story being played out in the heavens when they were born and over time, these came to represent the personality of that sign. It is these personality traits that we know and recognise now.

Astronomy and mythology developed separately but eventually merged to form a science that combines the two. That science is Astrology, which means the ‘science of the stars’. You could say that astronomy and mythology are the parents of Astrology and it’s only in recent times that they have been seen as separate sciences, however not to astrologers now or in ancient times.

The first aspect of Astrology that the ancients developed was the naming of the constellations. They looked up into the sky and saw pictures. These pictures became the Ram, the Twins, the Crab, the Scales etc. To them the constellations weren’t a random clutter of stars. Along with the picture they saw, were the characteristics of the symbol they portrayed.

The seasons were all important to the ancients. There were no supermarkets, no weather reports or agricultural colleges. They had to rely on their ability to ‘read the seasons’. The year is made up of four seasons – spring, summer, winter and autumn. Knowing how to understand and read the seasons was their link to survival. For them spring wasn’t a just a time of new blossoms and cute little lambs, it was a return to hope and new life. They needed to know when to plant, when to reap, when to sow, because if they didn’t they simply would not have survived. It was there ability to read the seasons and to use the heavens as a almanac, that allowed them to harness the seasons to their advantage. So to start with Astrology had nothing to do with Horoscopes and everything to do with agriculture, the weather, the seasons and survival. 

In the 21st Century the seasons are merely a backdrop to our lives. To the ancients they were everything. Those that could understand and work the seasons, survived, those that didn’t, perished. In the natural order of evolution and survival of the fittest, those who had the best knowledge survived and flourished. It’s the genes of those survivors that live on in our own DNA.

The third influence is the planets. The word ‘planet’ is Greek for ‘wanderer’. The ancients soon noticed that most of the stars moved in unison, as a giant kaleidoscope moving through the heavens. But amongst them the planets had their own movements, hence they were the ‘wanderers’. These movements were studied, the planets were given names and their paths plotted over thousands of years.

Not all the planets in our solar system are visible to the naked eye so at the time, only those visible became part of ancient astrology. We still refer to these planets as the ‘ancient planets’ and the ones discovered after the invention of the telescope as the ‘new planets’. The planets the ancients knew about and plotted were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and of course, the Sun and Moon.

The last and I think one of the most important, if one can be more important than the other are the gods and goddesses, behind both the planets and the constellations. These days we talk about the planets as having ‘rulers’. Venus, for example, is ruled by the goddess Aphrodite but to the ancients it was more than that. To them Venus wasn’t ruled by Aphrodite, the light they saw in the heavens ‘was’ Aphrodite. They believed it was the gods themselves moving across the sky, looking down upon humankind and influencing our lives.

These four aspects became as real to the ancients as any knowledge we process today. In ancient times Astrology wasn’t for entertainment, it was their means of survival.

Today each and every human being on the planet has encoded into every cell of their body, the DNA of 100 million ancestors. Those ancestors, wherever you live on the globe now, gave birth to Astrology and knew how to use it, to survive. No matter where we live on the globe our ancestors at some stage came from the northern hemisphere and it is the seasons of the northern hemisphere that the Star Signs get their characteristics from, wherever you happen to live now or where you were born.