Skip to content
Bodhastra
Your birth date

Date-only systems resolve immediately. Systems that require a birth time or place will say so instead of guessing.

Traditions to include

Choose one or several. With no choices, general browsing shows every tradition.

Your date and choices are saved only in this browser on this device. Clear all removes them.

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

Western · sign 6 of 12 · natural 6th house

Virgo

22 August – 22 September, 2025

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

When Virgo actually begins

ingress 202522 August 2025, 20:33 UTC
ends22 September 2025, 18:19 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202522 August – 24 August (37.2 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.

  • reservedattested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources

    Marcus Manilius (trans. Thomas Creech, 1697), Astronomica IV.15 (Creech, 'Of Virgo') · Alan Leo (William Frederick Allan, 1860-1917), HTJN, p.87 · Deborah Houlding · Cafe Astrology · Horoscope.com editorial staff · and 3 more

  • eloquentattested antiquity → present3 of 12 core sources

    Marcus Manilius (trans. Thomas Creech, 1697), Astronomica IV.15 (Creech, 'Of Virgo') · Raphael (house pseudonym; title page reads "The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, Author of the 'Prophetic Messenger'"), p.14 · Horoscope.com editorial staff

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

  • ruin and captivityJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.11.4

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 Virgo are still being assigned to it.

clerical and record work — 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

Mercury

attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources

modern

Ceres

modern only · no pre-1929 source1 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
  • earth
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
modality
  • mutable
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source7 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
  • south
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

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

exaltation
  • Mercury traditional
antiquity only · no modern source2 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Venus traditional
attested antiquity → present1 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Jupiter traditional
  • Neptune modern
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel
triplicity ruler
  • Moon by night
  • Venus by day
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel

mythic

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

symbol
  • The Virgin/Maiden

contested sheaf-of-wheat / ear-of-grain — one source disagrees.

modern only · no pre-1929 source5 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Ceres
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

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

body part
  • Abdomen
  • Belly (guts)
  • bowels
  • digestive organs
  • Intestines
  • nervous system
  • spleen
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • peridot
  • Sapphire
  • sardonyx
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
metal
  • Mercury (quicksilver)
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • Beige
  • Grey
modern only · no pre-1929 source2 of 12 core sources
day
  • Wednesday
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 14
  • 15
  • 23
  • 32
  • 5
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 Virgo 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
tall 2middle 1
build
well-proportioned 4lean 3large-boned 1stout 1
hair colour
dark 3brown 1
hair texture
curling 1
eye colour
dark 2blue 1
complexion
dark 2ruddy 2
face shape
round 2
head
large 1
forehead
broad 1full 1
shoulders
broad 1
aspect
handsome 2grotesque 1plain 1refined 1
previous Leoopposite Piscesnext Libra

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.