Reflections on Astrology, Time, and What Still Holds

I was born on March 2, 1959, at 1:38 PM, in Arthabaska. This makes me a Pisces, Cancer rising, with a Sagittarius Moon. I found this fascinating for a long time. My search for meaning drew me into that desire for order, rhythmed by the seasons. Over the years, I was both astounded by the results and troubled by contradictions that led me to question the very foundations of this powerful symbolic edifice we call astrology.

Now more than ever, astrology faces a simple objection, almost trivial, yet profoundly destabilizing: how can we keep speaking of Aries as a spring sign when half the planet experiences the March equinox as the onset of autumn?

Apparently, astrologers in the Southern Hemisphere don't seem to mind, carry on as usual, seemingly living to the rhythm of an American television series.

For a long time, this question was treated as a technical detail, or neutralized through an appeal to abstract symbolism. Yet it acts as a revealing agent. It doesn't merely challenge a seasonal metaphor; it exposes a deeper fragility in astrological language as it is predominantly understood today.

For the problem is not so much that the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. The problem is that even in the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of the zodiac have ceased to be experienced as rhythms of the world and have become psychological labels. This shift, seemingly harmless, transforms an ancient symbolic system of time into a personality typology — and it is precisely here that the system begins to crack.

I. When Signs Become Types

The signs of the zodiac have not always been what they have become. Originally, they do not describe people but moments. They divide the solar cycle into qualitatively differentiated segments, tied to the experience of time, seasons, labor, dangers, and expectations. The sign does not answer the question "Who am I?" but another, more ancient one: "In what moment of the world is this occurring?"

This relationship to time is fundamental. It presupposes a world where time is not homogeneous, where not all days are equal, where certain moments carry more tension, promise, or fragility than others. The zodiac is then a ritual language of time, not an identity card. The Greeks had a word for this quality of time: kairos — the opportune, charged, decisive moment — as opposed to chronos, the measurable, indifferent time of the calendar. The ancient zodiac is an instrument of kairos: it does not measure time; it qualifies it.

The shift occurs gradually in the modern era. Under the influence of individualism, popular psychology, and the popularization of astrology, the sign ceases to be a temporal marker and becomes a psychological category. The zodiac transforms into a typology: Aries, Taurus, Gemini become profiles, personality styles, sometimes even quasi-fixed temperaments.

This displacement is decisive. It transforms a language of time into a taxonomy of persons. It shifts astrology from a logic of rhythm to a logic of identity. From kairos to chronos. From the lived moment to the frozen profile.

There is a second tell, symmetrical to the Southern Hemisphere objection, and perhaps more radical still. The tropical zodiac — the one used by virtually all of Western astrology — no longer corresponds to the constellations whose names it bears. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, a slow wobble of the Earth's axis, the vernal point has shifted by approximately 24 degrees since the era when signs and constellations coincided. The person called "Aries" is today born under the stars of Pisces.

Yet far from undermining astrology, this objection illuminates what the zodiac has always been in practice: not an astronomical survey but a symbolic division of the solar cycle. If the system continues to function (or at least to produce meaning) independently of the stars it supposedly designates, it is because it was never a literal map of the sky. It is a calendar of qualitative time. Precession does not refute it — it reveals it.

A contrario, astrocartography, as formalized by Jim Lewis, rests on a destabilizing idea: the natal chart does not express itself in the same way depending on the location.

In other words:

• the individual is not locked into a fixed identity

• place activates certain potentialities

• lived experience changes when spatial coordinates change

This is a radically anti-typological thesis, even if it is rarely presented as such. Astrocartography does not claim that we change identity when we change location, but that identity has never been anything other than a provisional equilibrium between a being and its environment.

II. Why Typological Astrology Does Not Hold

The difficulty with typological astrology does not lie solely in the absence of solid empirical evidence. It lies in a deeper category error.

To say "I am an Aries" presupposes an already constituted individual, bearing relatively stable traits, to which the sign would correspond. Yet human experience constantly contradicts this image. Individuals change, reconfigure themselves, pass through phases of tension, rupture, and recomposition. They are not essences but processes.

The hemispheric objection, precession, and astrocartography bring this problem to light. If the seasonal metaphor can be detached from lived experience without consequence, if the zodiac can function independently of the stars it names, then it is no longer operative as a description of the world. The typological sign no longer holds through its rootedness in a rhythm but through a narrative convention. It floats.

Attempts at empirical validation fail for a structural reason: they test an astrology that speaks of types, whereas what astrology has always done with the greatest subtlety concerns the moment, the configuration, the phase. Typology is a late simplification, adapted to a modern demand for identity, but conceptually fragile.

The history of scientific verification confirms this in striking fashion. The statistical work of Michel Gauquelin, conducted from the 1950s onward, systematically failed to validate zodiacal typology. No significant correlation between sun sign and personality traits. On the other hand, Gauquelin believed he had observed correlations — highly debated, never definitively replicated — between certain angular planetary positions at the moment of birth and professional orientations. What modestly withstood scrutiny was not the sign but the configuration. Not the type, but the moment.

A telling fact: the more experienced an astrologer is, the less they speak of signs as character traits. In practice, it is cycles, critical periods, transits, moments of tension or release that structure interpretation. The sign becomes a color of language, rarely an explanatory engine. Practice silently invalidates popular theory.

Typological astrology is therefore not merely debatable; it is structurally inadequate. It freezes what is in the process of becoming, transforms a language of time into a crude psychology, and promises an identity where there are only unstable trajectories.

III. What Still Holds

And yet, not everything collapses with typology. Certain practices continue to be reported as meaningful: the great cycles, planetary returns, slow conjunctions, eclipses. This residue is striking, because it never concerns descriptions of character.

What holds does not describe. It signals.

These configurations do not speak about individuals but indicate that something is changing — in a person, a nation, or an event. They mark phases, not identities.

It is in so-called mundane astrology that this dimension appears most clearly. No one seriously claims that a country "is a Capricorn" in the typological sense. Practitioners of mundane astrology work exclusively with cycles, phases, and configurations. The Jupiter-Saturn cycle, for example, with its conjunctions every twenty years and its triplicity mutations every two centuries, has been read by medieval and modern astrologers as a marker of major economic and political transitions. One can debate the validity of these readings, but their structure is significant: they never speak of character, always of temporality. Mundane astrology has already carried out, in practice, the sorting that this essay proposes in theory.

What also seems to hold is the very notion of birth: the fact that a being, a community, or an event enters into time. From this entry point, it becomes possible to read not a destiny but a trajectory — a sequence of thresholds, tensions, and possible transformations.

We then shift from an ontological question to a temporal one. No longer "Who am I according to the sky?" but "What phase have I entered?" This difference is radical. A phase is by definition transitory. It designates a regime of tension, opening, or saturation destined to transform.

Eclipses are exemplary in this regard. They carry no precise content. Their power lies in their form: the temporary disappearance of a fundamental reference point, localized within a given symbolic space.

In a birth chart, an eclipse never acts diffusely. It occurs on an axis, touches already sensitive points, and indicates where the continuity of meaning breaks. The world continues, but something that was self-evident — here rather than there — momentarily ceases to be.

This structure is deeply isomorphic with the experience of human crises: an old meaning disappears in a specific domain, without the new one yet being legible, forcing a passage through a phase of indeterminacy.

IV. Toward an Astrology Without Signs

If we remove the typological signs, what remains is a minimal grammar of surprising coherence. An astrology without signs does not describe people. It orients attention in time.

It rests on a few simple parameters: intensity (the depth of transformation engaged), phase (rising tension, critical point, integration), and domain (the already sensitive zones of a life or a collective). Configurations — conjunctions, oppositions, squares, eclipses — become indicators of metastability: moments when an apparently stable system suddenly becomes more vulnerable, more plastic, more decisive.

From this perspective, astrology causes nothing. It explains nothing. It signals moments when decisions matter more, when bifurcations are possible, when the old order no longer quite holds.

It is then judged not on its descriptive truth but on its operative sobriety: does it help recognize critical moments without imprisoning in an identity, without promising a destiny?

V. Why It Still Works

A decisive question remains. If this minimal astrology still works — modestly, locally — is it because it describes an objective cosmic structure, or because it taps into something more fundamental in the human experience of time?

The most likely hypothesis is the second. Human societies cannot tolerate homogeneous, undifferentiated time. They produce symbolic divisions to make uncertainty inhabitable. Calendars, festivals, rites of passage, pivotal years all serve the same function: marking thresholds, synchronizing attention, giving temporal form to indeterminacy.

Rhythmic astrology then appears as a late, non-institutional ritual calendar, adapted to a world that has lost its rites without losing its crises. It does not predict. It frames attention. It modifies the regime of lived time, and it is in this that it acts.

This is not physical causality. It is a temporal reference point that acts because it transforms the way a moment is lived, interpreted, traversed. To say "you are entering a period of lost bearings, of saturation or reconfiguration" invites an awareness that proves, more often than not, transformative or revelatory. The statement does not describe an objective fact: it reorganizes the experience of the person who hears it. It introduces a frame, a threshold, a discontinuity into the undifferentiated flow of experience. And it is precisely this discontinuity that acts.

Typology fails here as well. To say "you are an Aries" marks no threshold, introduces no discontinuity, transforms nothing. But to say "you are entering a critical period" can, on the contrary, profoundly change the way an event is experienced — not because the statement is true in the scientific sense, but because it alters the regime of attention under which the moment is traversed.

One might object: if rhythmic astrology is merely one symbolic calendar among others, why keep this one? Why not replace it with any other system for dividing time? The objection is serious, and it deserves two answers.

The first is structural. Rhythmic astrology possesses a combinatorial complexity that simple calendars do not offer. The multiple cycles — Saturn return, Pluto transits, eclipses on precise axes — allow for a fine granularity, adapted to the singularity of individual trajectories. A rite of passage marks a single threshold; rhythmic astrology can mark several, at different rhythms, in different domains, for the same person.

The second is historical. A symbolic language is not interchangeable. It grows richer through accumulation, through interpretive tradition, through the sedimentation of experience. Astrology carries twenty-five centuries of reading human time. This does not make it true, but it gives it a weight that cannot be fabricated ex nihilo. One does not replace a stained-glass window with a clear pane on the grounds that it lets in more light.

VI. What Then?

Within this framework, the astrologer's role changes profoundly. They are no longer the one who describes identities, nor the one who announces events, but the one who helps situate an existence within the real time of its transformations. A birth does not tell us what someone is; it marks the point from which a singular process has begun. The chart is no longer a character map but a geography of tensions, sensitive axes, and questions that return in different forms.

This return of the same questions is not accidental. Cycle-based astrology rests entirely on the notion of recurrence: the same issues present themselves at regular intervals, but in transformed contexts. The first Saturn return, around age twenty-nine, does not pose the same questions as the second, around fifty-eight, but it touches the same axis, the same zone of tension. Freud identified in psychic life an analogous structure that he called repetition: the tendency to return to the same conflicts, not out of failure, but because something unfinished persists and demands to be reworked. Rhythmic astrology formalizes this intuition: it is not the answers that repeat, but the questions — and it is in the gap between two passages, in what has changed between the first transit and the second, that something shifts.

The astrologer does not seek qualities or flaws but identifies where time is charged, where history insists, where the same issues periodically demand to be re-traversed. From there, astrological practice becomes sober and demanding. It consists in signaling periods when habitual equilibria no longer quite hold, when decisions matter more, when one can no longer proceed on autopilot. The astrologer does not indicate what to do; they help formulate the right question at the right moment: what can no longer continue as it has? Which old reference point is losing its function? Where does an already-underway transformation demand to be consciously assumed?

But a risk must be named here. This power to frame attention is not neutral. Whoever designates the critical moment influences how it is traversed. Rhythmic astrology, while escaping the identity trap of typology, can create another, properly temporal one: transit anxiety, dependence on the planetary calendar, the inability to live a moment without referring it to a configuration. The responsible astrologer does not create dependence on cosmic rhythm; they help recognize a threshold in order to cross it — then they fall silent. The art of orientation in time also requires the art of silence about time. Not all periods are critical, and saying so is just as important as the reverse.

Astrology then ceases to be a discourse on identity or destiny and becomes again what it perhaps should never have stopped being: an art of orientation in the critical phases of time.

Conclusion

I was born on March 2, 1959, at 1:38 PM, in Arthabaska. So what?

Typological astrology is doomed because it transformed a language of time into a taxonomy of persons. It freezes what is fundamentally process, promises an identity where there is only becoming, and thereby loses both its coherence and its power.

What survives of astrology does not survive because it describes a hidden cosmic causality, but because it fulfills an essential human function: signaling the moments when time ceases to be homogeneous.

Astrology has never been, at its best, a science of character. It has always been an art of the threshold — an art of kairos. In a world that pretends all days are equal, systems capable of reminding us that certain moments matter more continue to act — not through magic, but through structure.