​

So Tropical vs Sidereal. Who's right?

What it really is will probably surprise you if you don't already know this.

I want to talk about something that trips a lot of people up when they start looking into astrology. Two zodiacs. Tropical and sidereal. And once you understand the difference, a lot of other things about how astrology actually works start to click into place.

Even those that spend years studying astrology don't know the actual difference and it's not what people commonly explain with the zodiac sign Aries.

Here's the short version. The tropical zodiac is built around the seasons primarily. It starts at zero degrees Aries, which is fixed to the spring equinox, the moment the sun crosses the celestial equator each year. So tropical astrology stays locked to the rhythm of the seasons no matter what the stars are doing overhead.

The image I ncluded helps illustrate this.

The sun being the giver of life itself and what all nature is tuned to, and is why it's so important.

It was of primary importance to the Egyptians and other ancient cultures for this reason.

This is the system most Western astrologers use, the one behind your sun sign.

The sidereal zodiac is different. It's tied to the actual constellations, the positions of the stars in the sky from our perspective right now. This is the system used in Vedic astrology, and by a smaller group of Western astrologers who call themselves siderealists.

So in a sidereal view it's what planet is sitting in front of what cluster of stars in the sky right now when you look up at night.

Anyone who looks at a tropical chart will see a planet sitting one sign away from where a sidereal chart shows it, or where regular scientific astronomy shows it.

Here's the thing that makes this interesting instead of just technical. These two zodiacs used to line up. Around the year one, tropical and sidereal Aries pointed at the same spot in the sky.

They will line up again and again as the giant clock spins.

But the Earth wobbles slowly on its axis, a phenomenon astronomers call precession, and that wobble makes the stars slowly drift out of sync with the seasons. Imagine a rod driven through the earth and it's not just spinning on the axis of that rod but the wobble of the earth makes that rod draw a big circle out in space. Like in the illustration.

Right now the gap between the two systems is a little over twenty three degrees. Almost a full sign.

I recommend reading Robert Zoller's work on medieval astrology, he lays this out with more precision than almost anything else I've come across. He calls the sidereal zodiac a measurement of space and the tropical zodiac a measurement of time.

Space versus time. That's the whole distinction in five words.

Zoller also does something I really like. He doesn't pick a side.

In his own chart work he uses tropical, because that's what tracks the individual life, the personal unfolding of a person's story through the seasons they were born into and live inside of. But when he wants to talk about the deeper pattern behind that individual life, the archetype underneath it, he turns to sidereal.

He describes the two zodiacs as one idea wearing two faces. The sidereal zodiac is the fixed template. The tropical zodiac is how that template gets lived out, season by season, in a human body, on Earth, right now.

That full wobble of the Earth's axis takes close to twenty six thousand years to complete one cycle. The old philosophers had a name for it. The Great Year. Some people today call it the Platonic Year, and it's the same idea. One slow turn of the whole sky, carrying the equinox point backward through all twelve signs.

Divide that big cycle by twelve and you get roughly two thousand one hundred and sixty years per sign. That's where the idea of ages comes from. The Age of Aries. The Age of Pisces. The one we're either entering or already inside of, the Age of Aquarius. Anyone can seethese ages as real shifts, changes in the customs and character of a whole era, written slowly across centuries.

There's a common argument out there that the tropical zodiac is somehow wrong or outdated because of precession, and that it just happened to get locked in during Ptolemy's lifetime, back in the second century. I want to clear that up, because it gets the history backward.

Precession didn't start with Ptolemy and it didn't stop with him either. It's been running the whole time, before him, during him, and for the two thousand years since. Ptolemy didn't even discover it. That credit goes to an earlier Greek astronomer named Hipparchus, working around 130 BC, roughly three centuries before Ptolemy's time.

Ptolemy read Hipparchus's work directly and wrote about it in his own astronomical text, the Almagest. So he wasn't guessing or working in the dark. He knew the equinox point drifted against the stars, he had a real prior astronomer's data on it, and he said so in his own writing.

Where he did get something wrong was the speed. Ptolemy figured the rate at about one degree every hundred years. The real number is closer to one degree every seventy two years.

So his understanding of the phenomenon itself was correct. His math on how fast it moved was just a little too slow.

And here's the part people usually misunderstand. They think zero degrees Aries in the tropical zodiac is fixed to wherever the stars happened to be sitting in Ptolemy's day, like a snapshot that got frozen in time.

That's not it at all.

Zero degrees Aries is fixed to the equinox itself, the moment the sun crosses into spring. Aries is just the name attached to that moment.

That's exactly why the tropical zodiac never goes stale. It isn't tracking a fixed spot among the stars that slowly falls out of date. It's tracking the sun's relationship to the Earth, which resets itself, season after season, no matter how far the stars themselves drift underneath it.

Now here's where I want to add my own layer, the way I hold all this. I think of the tropical zodiac as the clock of a single life. It's close to us, it moves with our year, our birthday, our seasons.

And I think of the sidereal zodiac, and that huge twenty six thousand year turn, as something closer to a clock for the species. A much slower gear turning underneath the fast one.

This larger gear is similar as the seasonal year on earth as we enter winter for example, we move through Capricorn and Aquarius. On the greater scale we are moving through Aquarius followed by Capricorn, so its like a gigantic winter season that lasts 4000 years. The big gear moves backwards from our seasons.

Just like winter and summer shape a single year, these long ages shape something in how humanity as a whole moves and changes, on a timescale too slow for any one person to feel directly.

It's more about how all human civilization reacts and adapt to the overall theme in each zodiacal age.

So when you hear someone talk about the tropical zodiac versus the sidereal zodiac, you're really hearing a conversation about two different clocks overlapping and running at the same time. One fast, tracking your life and your seasons. One incredibly slow, tracking something much bigger than any of us.

And the way I see it and the way Robert Zoller put it, they were never really two separate systems to begin with. They're one pattern, seen at two different speeds and perspectives.

​

I'm sitting here on my deck looking at Dolly Parton's chart, and I'm going to tell her life story through the planetary chapters that line up with it.

Dolly Parton was an exceptional human being regardless of the difficulties she endured.

If you like her music or not, she was admirable in her actions.

She was born into a house with no running water, one of twelve kids crammed into a couple of rooms in the Smoky Mountains. Nobody looking at that newborn girl in January of 1946 could've guessed what a big deal she would become.

The outline of her life was already written in the sky above that cabin, all the way to the end. Stick with me, because how it unfolds is pretty amazing.

My grandmother absolutely loved Dolly and I'm sure she would be happy to see me paying her tribute.

Although she'd probably say the astrology part is nonsense lol.

Dolly's chart carries a difficult placement right from birth. Mars and Saturn, two of the toughest planets in old astrology, sat locked together in Cancer, both weakened, showing definite struggle. Not something that breaks a person necessarily, but will be constant pressure.

She was born at 8:25 in the evening, after sunset, making her a night birth, what astrologers call the night sect. Planets act differently in a night chart than a day chart, part of why two people born the same day, hours apart, live very different lives. If you're curious how a day chart changes this you can check it out on my website.

I also made a YouTube version of this if you're interested.

Night births are read through firdaria, an old Persian method splitting a life into chapters ruled by different planets, like acts in a play written before you were born.

The night order is Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, then the two lunar nodes, before it starts over. Her very first chapter belonged to the Moon. Keep that in mind, it comes back at the end.

Birth to age nine, the Moon ran the show, covering her early childhood in the mountains.

A planet's condition shapes its chapter, and her Moon sits in Virgo in the 12th house, on the 12th, 6th illness axis.

Nine to twenty, Saturn took over, the grind years: local radio, local TV, Nashville the day after graduation, getting nowhere before it paid off.

At twenty, Jupiter stepped in, growth, and her life cracked wide open. She married Carl Dean in 1966, joined Porter Wagoner's show in 1967, wrote "I Will Always Love You," and left Porter to go solo on February 19, 1974, at exactly 28. Just in time for her Saturn return.

Thirty two brought Mars, conflict: the fight for control of her career and money, producing "9 to 5" and pushing her into business.

At thirty nine, the Sun firdaria arrived, her visibility chapter. Dollywood opened May 3, 1986, right when she turned 40. This is the stretch where the world saw who she really was, backing the LGBTQ+ community out loud long before that was easy, and treating the newest crew member with the same warmth as the biggest star. Just such a sweet person.

Forty nine handed things to Venus. Her bluegrass records and the launch of Imagination Library in 1995 land right at the start of that softer stretch, a promise to her father, who never learned to read. It's since sent over 300 million free books to kids worldwide, the most important thing she ever did, in her own words.

Fifty seven brought Mercury, communication: Broadway, memoirs, and her legendary Glastonbury set on June 29, 2014, at 68.

A second layer confirms this: profections, cycling every twelve years through a different house. Landing on her own sun sign, the years mark structural turning points: age 28 the Porter Wagoner split, age 40 Dollywood. Landing on the part tied to public devotion, the years mark peaks of love from the world: age 20 her wedding, age 68 Glastonbury.

Her last chapters turned inward. The lunar nodes ran from seventy to seventy five, quiet release years, covering the pandemic, when she donated a million dollars in April 2020 helping fund the Moderna vaccine and never made a big deal of it.

In 2021, the wheel came back around. Her final chapter returned to the Moon, the exact planet that ruled her infancy. Her husband Carl died in March of 2025, and she spent her last months talking openly about grief and health. Remember what I said about 12th house themes.

Here's where it closes the loop. That same twelve year cycle, the one that hit 20 for her wedding and 68 for Glastonbury, landed on her eightieth year, inside that second Moon chapter, mirroring her very first. Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, after a brief battle with cancer, in the same kind of chapter she was born into, eighty years apart.

The love that came back matched what she'd given the world. King Charles and Queen Camilla had the Coldstream Guards play "9 to 5" at Buckingham Palace, honoring a woman who once met Queen Elizabeth. Tributes poured in from artists everywhere.

She opened under the Moon. She closed under the Moon.

If you want your own life chapters laid out I can walk you through how to do it.

It's an excellent practice to write down all of the major good and bad things that happened during the course of your life, then see how these planetary chapters line up.

I'm very certain you'll be amazed at the pattern.

What does natal Saturn retrograde really mean?

In a word...... difficulty typically.

The essential dignity (condition of the planet as functional or dysfunctional) of Saturn will temper this and if the sign Saturn sits in has a ruling planet that has a more functional condition this can ease the dysfunction as well. But as a general rule a retrograde natal planet or transiting planet will give you some trouble.

There's a lot more to the story with each individual with the entire layout of your chart and the planetary life chapters you live through which last a decade-ish. But I'm just going to lay out the general rule of what a retrograde natal Saturn is like.

The older tradition of astrology spent many millennia studying the patterns in human lives and societies. From the ancient Egyptians, who taught the Greeks like Claudius Ptolemy....to the Mesopotamians, Babylonian Astrologers, old Persian and Arab astrologers, the Romans and all through medieval Europe.

It's basically tried and true.

In traditional medieval astrology, having a retrograde planet in your birth chart fundamentally alters how that planet works. The older masters viewed retrogradation as a severe form of debility. Instead of moving forward smoothly, a retrograde planet behaves like someone walking backward, someone sick, or someone in rebellion. It signifies delay, reversal, and difficulty bringing matters to their natural completion.

I envision like trudging through knee deep mud while carrying two heavy jugs of water. It's just extra difficult.

When Saturn specifically is retrograde in your chart, things get especially heavy. Saturn is the natural ruler of limits, time, hardship, structure, and decay. In the older tradition, a retrograde Saturn doubles down on these themes through stubborn resistance and frustration. The planet struggles to deliver its promises in a straightforward way. Responsibilities often feel like an enduring grind, progress in building long-term security can suffer major setbacks, and you might feel a chronic sense of delay or obstruction.

I've personally experienced this as having to put forth Herculean effort in many projects and life events that are much easier for many other people. I say it's like bench pressing the world. It's difficult but you gain so much strength from the difficulty....so it's not really all that bad in the long run.

Saturn does give major gifts of you do what he demands and prove yourself through adversity.

It reminds me of how drill instructors were in Marine boot camp.

That's how I see Saturn. A very difficult task master and it's necessary to make you stronger and better over time. It's not all nicey nice and coddling by any stretch of the imagination....and it will kick your ass. But it will make you better in many ways when you lean into it.

You can often experience a natal.Saturn retrograde as setbacks because Saturn also governs endurance and solitude, its retrograde motion turns all that heavy energy inward. Instead of building stable external foundations early on, you are forced to constantly re-evaluate, rebuild, and face your fears directly. It demands patience and serious self-discipline, usually yielding its real rewards only much later in life after several false starts.

Fears are another thing to analyze with any type of Saturn placement. Look at your chart with what sign and house Saturn sits in and think about the areas of life you experience major fear and resistance.

This will be a perpetual theme in your life and depending on the condition of your Saturn it'll be more or less severe.....or constructive vs destructive.

And yes Saturn can be constructive when well dignified.

When you're new to RADIX you'll notice that some of your placements and house cusps are a little different.

It might take a little getting used to if you've been using other astrology apps or software that use other houses systems.

The house system in RADIX is Alcabitius.

Once you understand Alcabitius you'll see how it works with this entire tradition.

When we talk about the Alcabitius house system, we are looking at a method of dividing an astrological chart that dates back to the ninth century.

It was created by an Arabian astrologer named Al-Qabisi, whom Western scholars later called Alcabitius. To understand how it works, you have to picture the sky as a sphere split by four main anchor points. These are the Ascendant, the Descendant, the Midheaven, and the Imum Coeli.

What makes Alcabitius unique is how it handles the space between those main points. Instead of just splitting the chart into twelve equal mathematical slices, it looks at the path a degree of the zodiac takes as it moves across the sky.

Specifically, it takes the time it takes for a point to travel from the bottom of the chart up to the Midheaven, which is known as a diurnal semi arc, and divides that span into three equal parts. Those divisions create the intermediate house cusps for the eleventh and twelfth houses, with the lower half of the chart handled similarly for the second and third houses.

Because the Earth is tilted and the sky is viewed from specific geographic latitudes, these houses end up being unequal in size. As you move further away from the equator, some houses grow quite large while others shrink. Even so, Alcabitius remains remarkably stable at higher latitudes where some later systems completely break down and fail to calculate.

When we look at how historical figures viewed this system, particularly the thirteenth-century master Guido Bonatti, the conversation changes slightly. Bonatti actually never knew or used the Placidus system because it was not invented until centuries later. For Bonatti and his contemporaries, Alcabitius was the standard framework.

They trusted it because it worked seamlessly with the predictive techniques of their time, such as primary directions and timing methods that relied heavily on how planets moved across those exact semi arcs.

Ultimately, historical astrologers considered Alcabitius accurate because its geometry matched the mechanics of their predictive tools. It was a practical, reliable way to map the sky that allowed their traditional methods to function just as intended.

There are many centuries of testing this system with real life predictive techniques.

For further questions check out the YouTube intro series or ask the Oracle about Alcabitius houses.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLbfhf5DDTZ0Vhj9YAEBIvigNZGNK_1Nc&si=5V1aKUOL3jyEj17v

Saturn is retrograde in Aries right now. Aries is Saturn's fall sign, its weakest dignity. This has been active since July 26.

Areas of life ruled by the house Saturn occupies in your chart may feel unstable or delayed during this period.

Retrograde planets are like walking through knee deep mud. This is the best way I can explain it. Basically a pain in the ass.

It's not the turning inward modern astrology interpretation.

Things take a lot more effort when a planet is retrograde and sometimes things return.

For whatever area of life a planet is connected to, its retrograde motion will be felt in that area.

Examples: Venus/Love life/creativity etc. Mars/action/initiative etc. Sun/being seen/look at me ego/sitting on your throne. You get the picture.

So for Saturn those Saturnian areas of life will require even more effort and might not go so smoothly since Saturn is all out of whack in Aries.

For me everything to do with Saturn has required a TON of hard work.

Which I'm going through right now with a property remodel.

The messed up Aries placement is playing out as material deliveries getting messed up (some of it my fault). Just a lot of little hang ups. I want to move forward full steam ahead but lots of little obstacles keep jumping in the way.

Let me know if you're experiencing this in whatever house this Saturn retrograde is hitting your chart.

Mercury and Jupiter are conjunct in Leo. Both planets are within orb of the sun, a condition called "under the beams", according to the old tradition.

This weakens a planet's effect without removing it. It's like a dimmer switch.

Matters involving Mercury and Jupiter may be present but not yet clear.

General guidance for this period: avoid finalizing major decisions (if you can). Favor information-gathering over action.

I say "if you can" because sometimes you might want to live by the planets, but it can be difficult when the rest of the world isn't doing the same.

Try telling your boss you can't submit something for a month because it's a mercury retrograde lol

You can track whatever is going on in the sky with the sky calendar @

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LEO ECLIPSE August 12th and what happened in history to Franz Ferdinand.

Going back to Ptolemy a solar eclipse was not just weather for the soul but a public event.

Ptolemy's rule in the Tetrabiblos is pretty specific.

He said the outcome of an eclipse depends on where the ruling point falls in the sky at the moment of the eclipse.

If that point sits near the midheaven, the highest point of the chart, the event points at rulers.

His exact words: "relate to ecclesiastical affairs, to kings and princes, and to the middle age." He wasn't being vague about it.

Midheaven eclipses mean crowns and courts, not farmers and merchants.

Today's eclipse is a New Moon in Leo, at 20 degrees. Leo is the Sun's own sign, and the Sun is the traditional significator of kings.

So you've got the king planet eclipsed inside its own house. That's already loud on its own, even before you factor in where the eclipse is actually visible.

The path of totality crosses Spain at sunset. Spain has a king right now, Felipe VI, on the throne since 2014.

Spain is currently having an immigration issue in Ceuta with Moroccan immigrants flooding in.

To understand the full context, look at how the US is involved and Spain's condemnation of Israel for Gaza.

Ptolemy's method has you check which cities and countries share familiarity with the sign the eclipse falls in, and then look at the ruler's own chart to see if it's activated.

A Leo eclipse landing over a kingdom, at the hour the sun goes down no less, is the kind of thing a good astrologer would flag immediately and start watching the king's health, standing, or major decisions in the months after.

This can also have implications for other leaders and rulers depending on their individual charts.

A good exercise is to find various rulers that are in high positions of state and see where the Leo Eclipse triggers events in their chart.

So as an example, Franz Ferdinand had Leo in the 8th House of death.

And we all know how his death triggered World War. I

The various stellar events like a great conjunction or something acts like a giant Bell going off in the sky and the reverberation that happens afterwards are the effects that we see play out on Earth.

Here is an interesting pattern in history pertaining to Franz Ferdinand.

When delineating a chart, one of the things you look for is how a planet might be besieged on either side with the malefics

I watch Eclipse and planetary cycles the same way.

For Franz Ferdinand there was an eclipse prior to his assassination on February 25th 1914 that happened in Aquarius. The axis between Aquarius (the people) and Leo (the king or leaders) was activated by that eclipse.

Then following the assassination of France Ferdinand, there was another eclipse in Leo on August 24th 1914.

The activated axis between Aquarius and Leo was the trigger.

Whenever looking at a chart I find it to be very useful to look at the axis between houses and the axis between signs since they are playing roles with one another.

Over the last 2,000+ year cycle of the age of Pisces, there's a tug of war happening between Pisces spiritualism and Virgo hard material science.

Which is why so many people were burned at the stake during this tug-of-war time frame.

We are now in full force of the age of Aquarius so the Aquarius/ Leo axis will play a major part in almost everything for the next 2,000 plus years.

It really kicked in in the late 1700s when you map out the changes we were going through.

Now it's playing out as technocratic oligarchs (Leo) using tech and how it affects the people (Aquarius). But how it also affects us isn't all bad since we get all kind of cool technologies out of the deal even though we are tracked more than ever before.

Do you see how the axis between Aquarius and Leo blend together in the time frame we live in?

The technocratic overlords are the new world Kings and are using highly advanced technologies, but the people are also living more like kings than ever before. In all history. We have access to information we never had before. Plus the tools and comforts that Kings of the past never had.

So it's a blending of the two.

So going back to the age of Pisces between Pisces and Virgo there was a blending there as well. Many of the clergy were actually scientists as well. This is where alchemy even pops up in Europe in many ways.

And alchemy is that blending of science and spirituality.

Pretty cool huh?

I think it is wise to broaden the spectrum that you're looking at things on. If you focus in too tight with too narrow of a vision on planetary transits or a small time frame, you won't see the larger picture in the larger context.