The Validity of Being Born on the Cusp

 

  A very basic astrology lesson, but there is more to be said about it than you might think at first glance. For Modern Western Sun Sign Astrology Enthusiasts, the casually interested often talk about being born on a Cusp. Any student of astrology is quick to correct them in saying that there is no such thing as being on a cusp, your Sun is either in one sign or another, but there is some relevance to this idea in understanding how a chart works on a practical level.

   Because the Earth orbits Sol in 365.256 days, our calendar would fall out of sequence if we did not add an extra day every 4 years. This is interesting for many reasons, one of which being that everything in the synodic cycles lines up in incredible ways, but DO NOT QUITE match.  It's this semblance of a rhyme within the repetition, with just enough qualitative drift which creates all the nuance and flavour of life. Everything orbits in an ellipse, not a perfect circle. The drift is where things get interesting.

    Now because it takes 365 and a quarterish days for the Earth to orbit, the days surrounding a sign change are fuzzy. Without knowing the year and the time, you can't know for sure which sign someone's Sun is within. So the concept of "the cusp" comes into play as people who only look at general newspaper horoscopes know the dates, but also know people born on those end dates which don't quite match the common Sun Sign delineations.  Further complicating the concept of cusps is the fact that Mercury can only ever be 28 degrees away from the Sun, and so is always within the same, or an adjoining sign to the Sun as it darts back and forth. Venus, likewise, can only be 48 degrees away from the Sun, and so generally winds up in the same or adjoining signs, and occasionally two signs away. This further muddies the idea of the cusp, as the closer the Sun is to the end of a sign, the more likely both Mercury and Venus are in the next sign over. 

   Another factor to consider is that the light balance is shifting across signs at all times of the year, and so aside from the massive shifts at the solstices where the momentum of light changes between waxing and waning, or the balance at the equinoxes where it shifts between more light or darkness every day, the similarity in the Yin Yang balance between the 29th degree of one sign and the first degree of the next sign is more similar than the first and last degrees of the same sign.  Even at the end of the seasons, in the final degree of a mutable sign, the very nature of that shift in the light balance is coded into the variable flowing nature of the mutable signs.

    So there is some validity to people who haven't dug up an accurate chart seeing this concept of the Cusp, as they will know people born on those days who blur the lines. Just some food for thought.