Tag: astrology

My star sign is Aquarius. Aquarians are, according to tradition: deep, imaginative, original, and uncompromising. That sounds like a pretty good description of me, right?

Now some of you might be thinking, “Hang on, wasn’t Dan born very close to the start of the year, and wouldn’t that make him a Capricorn, not an Aquarius?” I can understand why you’d think that.

And while it’s true that I was assigned the star sign of Capricorn at my birth, it doesn’t really represent me very well. Capricorns are, we’re told, serious, disciplined, and good with money. Do any of those things remotely sound like me? Not so much.

So many, many years ago I changed my star sign to Aquarius (I can’t remember exactly when, but I’d done it a long while before I wrote the linked blog post, which in turn is over 14 years old…).

I’ve been told that it’s not possible to change one’s star sign.

But really: who has the right to tell you what your place in the zodiac is, really? Just you.

And frankly, people telling you who you can and can’t be is so last millennium. By now, there’s really no excuse for not accepting somebody’s identity, whether it’s for something as trivial as their star sign… or as important as their gender, sexuality, or pronouns.

All of which is to say: I’ve launched a(nother) stupid website, ChangeYourStarSign.com. Give it a go!

It’s lightweight, requires no JS or cookies, does no tracking, and can run completely offline or be installed to your device, and it makes it easier than ever for you to change your star sign. Let’s be honest: it was pretty easy anyway – just decide what your new star sign is – but if you’d rather have a certificate to prove it, this site’s got you covered.

Whether you change your star sign to represent you better, to sidestep an unfortuitous horoscope (or borrow a luckier one), or for some other reason, I’d love to hear what you change it to and how you get on with it. What’s your new star sign?

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This week, the Internet went mildly crazy for a few minutes when people suddenly started discovering that their astrological sign might not have been what they previously thought. My favourite line in the linked article is “…the Minneapolis Star Tribute published an article, stating that our horoscopes are wrong,” to which my first thought was, “Well, duh.” This all comes about because when Ptolemy accidentally invented contemporary astrology, almost two millenia ago, he never specified whether his system should be based on the calendar year, or on the actual relative positions of the stars. While the calendar year has pretty much remained the same since Ptolemy’s time, our solar system has rotationally drifted slightly relative to the rest of the galaxy, and so the constellations aren’t quite in line with the calendar any more.

In theory, at least, if we were to plot a sun sign by the stars (as is practiced in some Eastern astrology) rather than by the calendar (as is practiced in most Western astrology), that’d make me not a Capricorn, as you might expect, but a Sagittarius.

I had a friend, once, who attached a not-inconsiderable amount of importance to her horoscope. However, she had a strange approach to the subject. I remember one particular morning when she got up and read her horoscope in the newspaper. She didn’t like what she read, and decided that it must therefore be wrong, and instead looked up the one on Teletext instead. Still unsatisfied, she eventually looked up her horoscope on the web, and – finally finding a fortune that she was happy to accept as hers – accepted it.

Thankfully, there’s no cause for concern for me, because I’m an Aquarius. I was born a Capricorn, but I never really felt comfortable as one, so I had my star sign changed to one that I felt suited me better. I have a certificate and everything, printed on an old inkjet printer and folded up in a drawer ever since. Once or twice, people have tried to tell me that it doesn’t work; that you can’t just “change” your star sign simply because you want it to be different. When this happens, I simply point out that my bit of paper is just as official, as believable, and as scientific as astrology is in the first place. And despite the (disputed) idea that our star signs might all have changed, as has flooded Facebook, my scrap of paper still says “Aquarius” on it, as relevant today as it always has been!