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

Western · sign 8 of 12 · natural 8th house

Scorpio

23 October – 22 November, 2025

2 claims about Scorpio can be traced to antiquity and are still made today. Everything else on this page arrived later, and each entry says when.

When Scorpio actually begins

ingress 202523 October 2025, 03:51 UTC
ends22 November 2025, 01:35 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202522 October – 24 October (35.9 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

These are the only claims on this page that may honestly be introduced with “tradition holds”. Each is attested by an ancient or early-modern source and by a contemporary one.

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 Scorpio, 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 Scorpio. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • public disgraceJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.13.10
  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.13.3

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 Scorpio are still being assigned to it.

divination and the occult — 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

Mars

attested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources

modern

Pluto

modern only · no pre-1929 source4 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
  • water
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
modality
  • fixed
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • feminine
attested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources
sect
  • nocturnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

classical

Classical taxonomy. Largely dropped by modern astrology.

direction
  • north
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

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

exaltation
  • Uranus modern
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source2 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Moon traditional
attested antiquity → present2 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Venus traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

mythic

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

symbol
  • The Scorpion

contested The Eagle — one source disagrees.

modern only · no pre-1929 source4 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Mars
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

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

body part
  • bladder
  • bowels
  • Genital organs
  • generative system
  • secret parts
  • Secret parts (genitals)
modern only · no pre-1929 source2 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • Opal
  • Topaz
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
metal
  • Steel/Iron
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • Black
  • Deep red
  • Maroon
  • Rust
  • Scarlet
  • Brown
  • Gold
  • Purple
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
flower
  • Chrysanthemum
  • geranium
  • rhododendron
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Tuesday
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 11
  • 18
  • 22
  • 8
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 Scorpio 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
short 3middle 2
build
stout 4strong 4ill-formed 3square 1
hair colour
dark 4brown 1
hair texture
curling 3
hair volume
plentiful 1
complexion
dark 3
face shape
broad 2square 2
brows
prominent 1
neck
short 1thick 1
chest
broad 1
limbs
strong 2
feet
ill-made 1
aspect
grotesque 1
constitution
strong 2

One further description 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 Libraopposite Taurusnext Sagittarius

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.