♐ Sagittarius

Sagittarius is the arrow of the zodiac: questing, honest and hungry for meaning. It aims at the horizon and needs room to roam.

Sagittarius at a glance

• DatesNovember 22 – December 21
• ElementFire
• ModalityMutable
• Ruling planetJupiter
• PolarityPositive
• ArchetypeThe Seeker / The Philosopher

Sagittarius dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Sagittarius from about 22 November to 21 December. 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 Sagittarius 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 Sagittarius is like

Sagittarius wants to know what it is all for, and it will not be talked out of the question by anybody who has stopped asking it.

It aims. The arrow is the sign's whole picture of itself: pick a horizon, commit, deal with the intervening ground later. It is why a Sagittarius life looks in hindsight like a run of unreasonable decisions that worked.

The honesty is the famous part, and it is not tactlessness. The sign says the true thing because the alternative, a room full of people agreeing about something none of them believes, is genuinely unbearable to it. It would rather be wrong out loud than right in private.

Mutable fire. It moves, and it needs the room to.

In the body, Sagittarius is linked to the hips, thighs and liver.

What it costs

The horizon keeps its distance. Sagittarius can spend a life arriving somewhere and immediately looking past it, and enjoying the thing you already reached is the one skill this sign has to learn on purpose.

And the truth-telling goes off in rooms that were not asking. There is a difference between honest and unedited, and the sign works out which one it was doing about four seconds afterwards.

The restlessness is what got you the life you have. It only wants a destination occasionally, instead of a direction.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

Your Sun is one of ten placements, and the other nine are not all this cheerful.

The Moon has its own sign, and Mercury, Venus and Mars have theirs. A Sagittarius Sun with a Taurus Moon books the flight and then wants its own bed. That is not a contradiction to be solved. It is two placements, doing their jobs.

Born with the Sun in Sagittarius

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Sagittarius 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 Sagittarius sits in your chart, whatever your sign

Sagittarius is on one of your houses whether or not you were born in December, and whether or not a planet is standing in it.

Traditionally it is read as the window somebody left open. Find yours, and ask where a low ceiling has made you leave.

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

Sagittarius season, in the sky

The Sun is in Sagittarius from late November to late December, and the direction it is pointing while it is there happens to be the middle of our own galaxy. The centre of the Milky Way lies in the constellation Sagittarius, about 26,000 light years off, behind so much dust that we cannot see it in visible light at all.

It is also the constellation the year now turns in. The December solstice point has drifted back until it stands among the stars of the Archer, so the shortest day is spent in front of a figure named for aiming at a horizon.

Jupiter, the sign's ruler

Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, which takes about twelve years to go round the zodiac, roughly a year to a sign. That is why a Jupiter return lands near your twelfth birthday, your twenty-fourth, your thirty-sixth.

Jupiter's sign and house are where a chart expands and where it overestimates, and those are the same place. It is the planet of more, and more is not always the answer.

Sagittarius compatibility

Sagittarius 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.

Sagittarius also touches

travel, philosophy, religion, higher learning, publishing, the foreign, luck, the quest.

A question to sit with

What are you searching 'out there' for that's within reach?