Almagest

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The Sagittarius Ascendant

general summary for a Sagittarius Ascendant (rising sign)

What the tradition reads

A Sagittarius Ascendant is read as enthusiasm that precedes the person into the room. Sagittarius is ruled by Jupiter, and the tradition, following Alan Leo's delineations for the rising sign, describes those with Sagittarius rising as frank, honest and generous, more concerned with the doing of a thing than with what it will earn them, versatile enough to master several fields at once, yet capable of a restlessness and petulance under strain that comes, Leo writes, from a double nature working against itself. The manner is open, cheerful and youthful even into later years, a first impression built on candour rather than tact, paired with an independence that resents restraint of any kind and shows it quickly when restrained. The tradition reads this Ascendant as naturally philosophical, drawn to questions of meaning even when the rest of the chart is not, and notes, as with any rising sign, that the trait is least examined early in the sign and most deliberately carried late in it. The shadow is a bluntness that says more than it means once provoked; its ease is an optimism that keeps this Ascendant moving forward, in temperament if nothing else, no matter what has just gone wrong.

The story

The Ascendant has carried the technical role of first appearance since Hellenistic astrology began fixing a horoscope to a precise hour, the ecliptic's crossing of the eastern horizon then marking a point the Sun's monthly sign could not supply by itself. Sagittarius, the sign that can stand at this door, carries two competing identities the tradition has never resolved into one. Some readings name the archer Chiron, the centaur son of the Titan Cronus and the nymph Philyra: it was Cronus who is said to have taken a horse's shape to escape his own jealous wife, Rhea, while he was with Philyra, and Chiron was born of that union; the centaur is remembered elsewhere in myth as tutor to Jason and other heroes. A separate tradition names the figure Crotus, a satyr and son of Pan who hunted on horseback and lived among the Muses, who asked Zeus to set their companion among the stars once he died. Babylonian astronomers had already mapped the same stars long before either Greek telling, as Pabilsag, a name meaning forefather or chief ancestor, tied to the god Nergal and shown firing an arrow from horseback. A rising sign built on three different claims to the same aim gives the tradition its picture of Sagittarius's own reach outward, toward more than one horizon at once.

Written from

Corpus key ascendant:Sagittarius.