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The twelve sun signs, from Babylonian star lists through Ptolemy to the newspaper horoscope.

Western · sign 11 of 12 · natural 11th house

Aquarius

19 January – 18 February, 2025

Not one claim about Aquarius in this corpus is attested both in antiquity and today. Everything said about this sign now arrived after 1899 — and some of what the old books did say about it was dropped. This page separates the two.

When Aquarius actually begins

ingress 202519 January 2025, 20:00 UTC
ends18 February 2025, 10:06 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202519 January – 21 January (34.9 h)

Computed from the Sun’s true ecliptic longitude for this year, not read from a fixed table. If you were born within a day of either boundary, a site using a table may put you in a different sign — and it is the table that is wrong.

What survives from antiquity

Nothing. This sign has no character claim attested in both antiquity and the present, so this page cannot open with “tradition holds” at all.

no claim attested in both antiquity and the present

What arrived with the popularisers

Claims that reach us through Alan Leo, Raphael and Sepharial — the Edwardian writers who turned astrology into a mass-market genre — with no ancient source behind them. These are usually the most familiar things said about Aquarius, and the page reference for each is below it.

What the tradition said and we stopped saying

Attested in antiquity, and repeated by no contemporary source in this corpus.

The fate the classical texts predicted

Firmicus Maternus and his contemporaries did not write character sketches. They predicted outcomes, and this is what they predicted for Aquarius. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • a short lifeJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.16.2
  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.29.1

The work

Occupations are the one part of this tradition that demonstrably reaches the present. Character claims mostly do not, and physiognomy does not at all — but the trades the classical texts assigned to Aquarius are still being assigned to it.

engineering and technology — attested in antiquity and repeated today.

Rulership

The classical scheme gave every sign one of the seven visible planets. The outer planets were discovered between 1781 and 1930 and reassigned later, so where a sign has two rulers, both are real claims from different centuries. Neither is the correction of the other.

traditional

Saturn

attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources

modern

Uranus

modern only · no pre-1929 source5 of 12 core sources

Correspondences

Grouped by what kind of claim each is. Element and modality are agreed by every source in every century; the lucky numbers are agreed by almost nobody. Both appear on every astrology site in the same table, in the same type, which is how one borrows the other’s authority.

structural

Agreed by every source in every century.

element
  • air
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
modality
  • fixed
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • masculine
attested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources
sect
  • diurnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

Classical doctrine. Stable, but the outer planets are a modern addition.

exaltation
  • Pluto modern
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Neptune modern
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Sun traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

mythic

The sign's image. Phrasings vary; the figure does not.

symbol
  • The Water-Bearer
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source5 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Juno
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

Melothesia — the sign's part of the body. Ancient, and not medical.

body part
  • ankles
  • calves
  • circulatory system
  • forearms
  • Shins
  • legs
  • Legs
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source2 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • Amethyst
  • Garnet (January-born)
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
metal
  • Uranium
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • Blue
  • electric blue
  • turquoise
  • Silver
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Thursday

contested Friday — one source disagrees.

modern only · no pre-1929 source2 supporting sources · none in the core panel
number
  • 4
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

The body the old books describe

William Lilly, Raphael and Sepharial all told you what a Aquarius looked like. Modern astrology dropped this entirely: across the whole corpus, not one physical description is repeated by a contemporary source. It is reproduced here as what those writers said, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and for no other reason.

stature
middle 2short 1tall 1
build
strong 3well-proportioned 3stout 2square 1
hair colour
fair 2dark 1variable 1
eye colour
blue 1dark 1
complexion
fair 2ruddy 2
face shape
long 3
forehead
clear 1
chin
well-developed 1
aspect
handsome 4
features
straight 1

2 further descriptions from these authors classifies people by ethnic type. It is recorded in our data with its source and page, and is not reproduced here.

previous Capricornopposite Leonext Pisces

Bodhastra documents what astrological traditions have said, and when they started saying it. It is presented as cultural history and entertainment. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or predictive advice, and nothing here is a claim about what will happen to you.

Every source, listed

Place data from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0.