Cusps

Cusps are one of those perennial hot-button topics, like the yearly rediscovery of the constellation Ophiuchus, or the persistence of “in retrograde” verbiage, that finds astrologers leaping from their chairs to pen strongly worded objections to anyone, anywhere, using the term for identification.

This is how the conversation goes: it begins with someone announcing, “I am a Libra-Scorpio cusp” and ends with an astrologer deriding them with grandfatherly logic like “a sun sign is a sun sign is a sun sign”, and nobody walks away feeling satisfied. The point is that even though identifying oneself as a Such-and-Such Cusp doesn’t have much legitimacy from an academic astrological point of view, it doesn’t change the fact that those “on the cusp” resonate with the archetypal qualities of the sign preceding or following their sun sign. And there are valid reasons why.

As someone born in late-stage Leo, I considered myself a Virgo Cusp for many years prior to taking up astrological study. However, I also have Virgo rising, and the rising sign (or ascendant) informs self-expression in some pretty fundamental ways.

The rising sign could be one of the reasons you “feel like a cusp”. This is especially relevant if your sun placement borders the preceding sign. Say you’re a Taurus Sun with Aries Rising. You might be picnicking in a sun-dappled field, eating fancy cheeses off an artisanal wooden board. You know, real Taurus-like. But if the world perceives you as a warrior, you’re going to respond to their assessment in kind.

Your ascendant has just as much to do with others’ perceptions as it does personal inclinations, maybe even more so the former. We learn through mirroring, and if early in your life you were surrounded by people who expected you to demonstrate Arian courage, impulsiveness, and aggression, that’s going to influence how you showcase your otherwise steady and sensible Taurean sun traits. We give a first impression, get treated according to that impression, and respond to others’ impression of the impression. It’s a feedback loop.

The second factor has to do with the placement of other planets in the signs bookending your sun sign. If you have a Taurus sun but five other planets in Aries, well, that adds some weight. The planet Mercury is the major player in this respect. Mercury governs communication. It is the closest planet to the sun with the fastest orbit and can therefore only ever fall in the same sign as your sun or the sign immediately preceding or following it.  

For example, if you are a Capricorn sun, your only options for Mercury placements are Sagittarius, Capricorn, or Aquarius.  If you consider yourself a Capricorn-Aquarius Cusp because you resonate with out-of-the-box thinking, attributable to Aquarius, check where your Mercury is placed, because having Mercury in Aquarius would definitely shift the relating style of a Capricorn Sun.

The less-talked about scenario has to do with secondary progressions. A progression is a method of chart analysis where each day following your birth corresponds to a year. If you are a Capricorn born on January 20, 2001, and want to read your progressed chart at age 10, you would pull a chart for January 30, 2001 – ten days ahead.  The sun moves one degree per day, so at age ten, your progressed sun was already several degrees into Aquarius.

Those born in the last degrees of the final decan of their sign have their sun shift into the next sign by progression at an early age, so their sun sign qualities would have been filtered through the lens of the next sign on the wheel. This provides a different energy than someone born at say, 5 degrees of Capricorn, who wouldn’t experience a progressed sun until they were in their 20s - and might feel far “more like a Capricorn” because of it.

Astrology as an art form is about weaving. It’s about storytelling. This is why sun sign astrology only scratches the surface of why you are the way you are, and why horoscopes cannot speak to the nuance of your life, only to the general flavor. If you feel like a cusp, I encourage you to get cozier with your sun sign! Self-defining as a cusp is a convenient way to create distance from the sun-sign traits that you deem problematic, so studying these characteristics and reclaiming them is an act of radically showing up for yourself.