At some point in my love affair with astrology, I read that the degree of your natal sun usually corresponds to a pivotal event in your life that helped to shape who you are. Possibilities include: parental divorce, a significant move, the birth of a sibling, the death of a loved one. In other words, a BIG event.
When I first learned this, I tested it on the charts of people I knew well, starting with my own chart and that of my family. My Gemini sun is 16 degrees and 12 minutes. Five months after my 16th birthday, my parents left Venezuela, where I’d been born and raised, and moved to Florida. The significance of that move once prompted my dad to remark that since that move, I was reluctant to call any place home. And he was right.
Rob’s sun is 25 degrees and 27 minutes of Taurus. His corresponding age was around 25 – or 1973. He received a pardon from Gerald Ford for dodging the draft and refusing to go to Vietnam, a “crime” for which he was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to alternative service.
Our daughter’s Virgo sun is 8 degrees and 32 minutes. Around that age – third grade – I had her I.Q. tested to see if she could get into the gifted program. The school she was in just wasn’t challenging her. The school counselor tested her first. I still remember sitting with the woman, who wouldn’t show me Megan’s actual score, but covered it up and showed me some other numbers that didn’t make any sense. I got annoyed and asked her to tell me what my daughter’s I.Q. was.
“94,” she finally said.
I burst out laughing and got Megan tested privately. Her I.Q. came out at 135 and she got into the gifted program. That made all the difference in her education.
My dad had a 26 degree 44 minutes Libra sun. He was around 27 when he met my mother on a blind date.
Recently I did a chart for a friend whose Virgo sun is 10 degrees and 58 minutes. Around the age of 11, she saw a UFO and everything in her life changed.
Another friend asked me to do a chart on a man she’s seeing, His sun was around 8 degrees. At that age, his brother was nearly killed in an accident.
When I do charts for people born right on the cusp between two signs and the sun is 00 degrees and a few minutes, I always ask if something big occurred at the person’s birth. Often, there were complications at birth. One man was born with the cord wrapped around her neck. A woman was born dead and revived.
Here’s the place to get your free birth chart.
Just enter your name, place and date of birth. If you don’t know the time, use noon. The sun travels a degree a day, so you’ll be able to see the degree but the minutes may not be correct. Take note of the sun’s degree, use that for your age, and think back. What pivotal event occurred for you that year?
I think of this as synchronicity in action.
My sun is Leo/Virgo cusp as you know, Trish. 29 Leo. 29°55 minutes. I was living in San Antonio when I was 29, lost my job, yet again, couldn’t find another one, yet again, and had to go back to El Paso and live with my mother, yet again. I couldn’t find a job for a year and she wasn’t keen on having me stay there. We managed but we were both unhappy. I was in El Paso for 7 years, eventually got a place of my own, but was very poorly paid, as usual. Then I moved to Santa Fe. Not sure what that does to your theory.
I’d say your experience fits. It started at age 29.
My 29th year wasn’t pivotal or life changing. It wasn’t revelatory in any way (that experience had happened the year I turned 28). When I turned 29, I went back to what I was living before, which was a kind of pivot. I guess. 29 was the year of my Saturn return and it was much more reflective of that kind of transition, I think. It canceled out any changes that could have come out of that brief period of promise. There’s a reason the anaretic degree of a sign is called the killing point. In my case, 29 wasn’t a BIG EVENT. I didn’t almost die literally or figuratively. I didn’t transform, I didn’t grow from it. Not that year.
I’m not saying the degree of your sun doesn’t tell you when to expect a life changing event. I am saying that the Saturn return trumps everything, a pun I didn’t intend to make but does reflect the reality of limitation. If you were born on the 29th degree, know that if you’re in the middle of a big event, it will deflate like a balloon that never gets to hold real air. It’s a clarification, now that I think about it, rather than a challenge to your theory.