♎ Libra

Libra is the scales of the zodiac: relational, fair and drawn to beauty. It weighs every side and seeks balance, often through other people.

Libra at a glance

• DatesSeptember 23 – October 22
• ElementAir
• ModalityCardinal
• Ruling planetVenus
• PolarityPositive
• ArchetypeThe Diplomat / The Artist

Libra dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Libra from about 23 September to 22 October. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Libra and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Libra is like

Libra begins at the equinox, on the day the light and the dark are equal, and it never really lets that question go.

It thinks in relation. A Libra opinion is genuinely not finished until it has been held up against somebody else's, which gets mistaken for having no opinion. The opposite is nearer the truth: the sign has usually seen more sides of it than the person demanding an answer has.

And it does the unglamorous half of fairness. Noticing who has not spoken. Adjusting the plan so that it costs everybody something. Doing it without being thanked, because when it is done well nobody can see it was done at all.

Cardinal air. It starts things, and what it starts is usually a relationship or an agreement.

In the body, Libra is linked to the kidneys and lower back.

What it costs

Weighing has no natural end. Libra can hold the scales so long that the clock makes the decision instead, and then live with a choice it never quite made.

And peace is expensive when you are the only one paying for it. This sign can concede so smoothly that nobody in the room notices anything was given up, Libra included, and the account only comes due later.

The answer is not to become blunt. It is to count yourself as one of the sides.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

The Sun is one placement of ten, and the rest of the chart is where the disagreements live.

Your Moon is in a sign of its own, and Mercury, Venus and Mars each in theirs. A Libra Sun with a Capricorn Moon keeps the peace in the room and privately keeps score. A chart will hand you both halves and leave you to decide what to do about them.

Born with the Sun in Libra

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Libra at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Libra sits in your chart, whatever your sign

Libra is in your chart. It has to be: twelve signs divide the whole circle, so one of your houses is Libra's.

Traditionally it is read as the table with two chairs. Find yours, and ask what you have been waiting for somebody else to weigh in on.

Libra on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Libra rising sign, a different placement from a Libra Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Libra season, in the sky

Libra begins at the September equinox: the Sun crossing the celestial equator again, this time heading south. The word means equal night, and the two crossings are the only moments in the year when the Sun comes up due east for almost everybody alive.

It is not quite the day of equal light, and the reason is pleasing. The atmosphere bends the Sun's light over the horizon before it has really arrived, and the Sun is a disc rather than a point, so we are given a few extra minutes at each end. The genuinely equal day falls a few days after the equinox. Even the balance runs a little generous.

Venus, the sign's ruler

Libra is ruled by Venus, the same planet that rules Taurus, and this is the relational half of its job: what you are like with another person in the room.

Its sign and house describe how you go about being liked, and what you privately consider fair. Two people with a Libra Sun and Venus in different signs will keep the peace in completely different ways.

Libra compatibility

Libra with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Libra also touches

relationships, art, justice, aesthetics, diplomacy, marriage, mediation, charm.

A question to sit with

When is the peace worth keeping, and when has it cost more than it saved?