Throughout history, end-of-the-world movements missing their mark number in the "hundreds of thousands at the very least”, says Richard Landes, historian at Boston University and director of its Centre for Millennial Studies. But people eager for the world to end are not to be denied, and this time, of course, all will be different.

Man, for some strange reason, often appears to be more interested in when his planet and the human species will end, as opposed to nurturing it (and others). We do not have the power to save the planet nor to end its life, but we most certainly do have the power to make our stay here more pleasurable, meaningful and educational. The frenzy that surrounds prophecies, theories and conjectures surrounding the end of the world is as old as the species of man; one can only wonder why this is, as it makes no rational (or spiritual) sense at all.

Many people, even those who know very little about astrology, appear to have knowledge of their Sun (star) sign and their Ascendant (rising) sign. Great emphasis is placed on these two snippets of information and as an astrologer you are expected to smile knowingly and then burst forth into a rendition of astrological psycho babble when presented with this information. We have addressed the star sign misconception in a previous edition of the Planets and You and we now turn our attention to the rising sign. 

Here we encounter another major difference between our astrology and modern astrology. Signs do not do anything; they simply describe the planets that are posited in them. They are adjectives while the planets are nouns, and the aspects are verbs. These 12 adjectives each have a set of characteristics, but they do not have the fully-fledged and inflated personalities allotted to them in modern astrology. They will be masculine or feminine, barren or fertile, mute or voiced and humane or bestial, and some are even maimed. Each sign is categorised by an element and by a mode or quality, which further adds to its characteristics.