Sasha Fenton - Everyday Astrology for a Better Life: Maximise your potential by using astrology in your everyday life

For my husband

JAN PETER BUDKOWSKI

All illustrations have been painted especially for this book by

Emma Garner, except for the following which appear by kind permission:

A RE you an emotional Scorpio who needs to pour out your latest drama to your friends and relatives? Perhaps you are an uptight Capricorn who keeps all your feelings to yourself. Are you a flirtatious Libran, a brave but thoughtless Arian or a careful Cancerian? Do your home and garden display Taurean flair or are your plants neatly laid out in Virgoan rows? Are you a Leo who earns a frequent-user discount at your dress shop and beauty salon? Or a Sagittarian who is quietly and desperately yearning for the wide open spaces while surrounded by a nagging family and a household full of pets? Do your poor, painful Piscean feet make a martyr of you? Are you an Aquarian who is permanently searching for more and more knowledge? Whatever your individual motivations and peculiarities might be, you should be able to find them in this book.

The terms sun signs, star signs and even zodiac signs all mean exactly the same thing. Your sun sign or star sign is simply the sign of the zodiac that you were born under. With a good understanding of sun-sign astrology, the most straightforward form of this ancient science, the reasons behind your behaviour patterns and even some aspects of your past and future can become clearer and can help you understand the choices you find yourself drawn to in life. If you want to know why you prefer your home to be minimalist and spartan or why you like it crammed full of dust-gathering knick-knacks, your sun sign could well hold the answer. If, however, you are not typical of your sun sign, it would be worth reading about the other sun signs in order to discover which one could be exerting a strong influence over the decisions you make every day. The beauty of sun sign astrology is in its simplicity all you need to know to start is your date of birth. Such a process may be all that it takes for you to begin looking into astrology more deeply and then to extend your research to discovering your moon sign, your rising sign and all the other modifying features on your own personal birth chart. Nevertheless, learning about the different ways in which a sun sign can influence every aspect of your life, from the partners you choose to the working role that brings out the best in you, makes an ideal starting-point for exploring astrology.

It is not difficult to work out which sun sign you belong to; even people who are on the cusp of two signs usually feel more like one of those signs than the other. Now, work though the book to find out in detail how your sun sign, and those of your loved ones, affects your motivations and your character, and even to discover what lies in store for you in the years ahead.

Before the advent of telescopes, astronomers thought that the sun travelled around the earth, passing in front of each of the twelve constellations that lay along its path.

We now know that the planets of the solar system, including the earth, orbit the sun and only appear to be moving through these signs from our perspective on the earth. The belt of the heavens encircling the earth along the ecliptic (the apparent pathway of the sun) is known as the zodiac, and it is divided into 12 equal segments the constellations that are the signs of the zodiac.

For example, on January 1 the sun appears to be travelling through the sign of Capricorn, while on July 1 it appears to be travelling through the sign of Cancer.

If you are unsure of your sun sign, refer to the sun-sign table opposite. (To complicate matters, unfortunately each sun sign changes at a slightly different time of day every year. Therefore, if you are born on the cusp of a sign, you may find that one set of magazines or newspapers gives one date for the start or the end of your sign, while another goes for a slightly different one.)

The signs of the zodiac are always arrayed in the same order. They start with Aries, setting the astrological year rolling at the spring equinox on March 21, which the ancients saw as the beginning of the new year. Aries is always followed in turn by the sun signs Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces.