Why you don’t resonate with your Sun sign in astrology & why you should read your horoscope for your rising sign?

Dear NightFall Astrology readers,

People often ask me which sign they should read their horoscope for. The plain answer is that you should read or watch for your rising sign. But there are quite a few technical reasons behind that, and I know my readers like to learn, so here I am coming at you with another educational article!

Firstly, we should define what horoscopic astrology is (the lawyer in me always has to set the definitions before anything else) :

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Horoscopic astrology is based on the Ascendant. “hōroskópos (ὡροσκόπος)”, the ancient Greek word, literally means “the hour marker” and refers to the Ascendant.

In current modern astrology, there’s the weird concept of “you should read the horoscopes for all your big 3 (Sun, Moon, Rising)”, and muddying everything, but mostly because such astrologers want your “watch time” on Youtube or “reading time”, so they can get paid (I know I’m being very blunt here, but that’s the truth). Also, often in big entertainment-oriented magazines, the horoscopes aren’t even written by real astrologers.
That’s where the “Barnum effect” kicks in, defined as “a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals believe that generic personality descriptions and statements apply to themselves. The description is general and vague enough to apply to almost everyone”.

It’s irrelevant what sign you identify with; following the Barnum effect, you can resonate with anything. If astrology is to be taken as a serious discipline, we need to be precise, and reading for your rising sign literally sets up the transiting planets to fall in the houses of YOUR natal chart.

Of course, looking at in which houses of your chart the transiting planets fall gives very little info (about 30%) about your individual horoscope since we aren’t looking at what aspects they’re making to your natal planets and the rest of predictive techniques.

For example, in my upcoming monthly horoscopes (part of my Premium Membership) for each of the 12 zodiac signs, I’ll always tell you to read them for your Ascendant, period.

So, I recommend you stop reading for your Sun sign; it likely isn’t even manifesting accurately. You can vibe with it, but it’s not showing up or being useful.

{ Side note: if you have a day chart, meaning your Sun is above the Ascendant/Descendant axis, your Sun sign horoscope will provide you with the general background themes and quality of a particular period.
You can get a free birth chart from my website by following this link. }

So, whether or not astrologers even know that they’re doing it, when they write horoscopes, they’re applying a concept that is inherently horoscopic, i.e. ascendant-based.

Historically, Sun sign horoscope columns started showing up in the early 20th century, after hundreds of years of an astrological recession, where many foundational concepts, mainly of the horoscopic Greek tradition, were lost.

The pop culture novelty with astrology as a psychological Sun sign-based analysis is so incredibly new to the tradition that you know it isn’t a profound representation of astrology. And prediction (I prefer using the word “forecast” as astrology is 80-90% accurate, and the rest is in the hands of God or the Divine) is an inherent component of what astrology is based on.

Sun sign columns are not as resonant to the idea of astrology when they cannot be as predictive as more coherent methods of looking at the horoscope. However, Sun-sign-pop-culture horoscopes can give you fun and quick details about each of the 12 archetypes. So it’s an easy way to start learning about astrology.

I. The difference between the Sun, Moon & Rising signs:

The rising sign is literally the sign of the first house. The Sun, Moon, and the planets are all in the houses. The rising sign is a house, meaning it is an area of life. What is the area of life of the rising sign/1st house? It’s literally YOU: your physical body, behaviour, and personality.

You might have your Sun or Moon in the 1st house, adding details, but the rising sign itself is the chart area that describes your temperament, mannerisms, and who you are. The Sun and Moon represent more the houses they RULE in your birth chart.

This means that the Sun or the Moon can appear in the first house; they might show one of your goals linked to the houses they rule. If you have the Sun there, for example, this is you being seen and you’re your personality. If the Moon is in the first house, you can show that you feel safe when you’re seen, given attention, and providing light to others.

The rising sign itself is the archetype that describes the behaviour you’re putting out in the world. The Sun sign often represents your goals, what you’re going after, the archetype of how you achieve knowledge in the world, and your leadership style. The Sun is mental.

So, when the Sun is in a particular sign, it lights up that sign. The house containing your Sun is in an area of life. Again, the Sun represents intelligence, ideas, and pursuing goals in that area of your life. The sign of the Sun is the archetype, and the house is there for the area of life where you’re pursuing your goals.
For example, in my chart (using the whole-sign house system), I have the Sun in Leo in the 10th house, meaning that I’m very vivid, passionate, and like to lead in my career. Also, my public image has a very creative vibe.

The moon sign describes your emotional nature and safety. It’s not just how you process emotions; it’s also what way of behaving returns you to the centre. The Moon reflects the Sun’s light, meaning it’s responsive and reflective energy. So our immediate emotional responses and reflexes are described by the Moon sign.

In my case, I have a Scorpio Moon conjunct my Ascendant, so I feel safe when I show my intense personality to others.

In Sum, the Sun and the Moon fall into the houses; they don’t start the chart. The rising sign and first house are the chart’s beginning; they kick off the rest of the houses and planets falling into them.

II. Why you don’t resonate with your Sun sign?

So after explaining to you why you should read your horoscope based on your Ascendant, let’s break down the reasons why you MAY NOT identify with your Sun sign (also commonly known as your “zodiac sign”).

There are 5 main reasons:

1) You are an entire chart. You aren’t just a Sun sign. That is a baseline of what astrology is.

2) If you are NOT a Leo Rising, the Sun isn’t ruling your first house of self. A planet rules the rising sign, and the rising sign (I repeat) is the part of your chart that most directly relates to your physical body and personality. It’s the most personal point in the chart.

Every rising sign has a ruling planet, and the Sun rules Leo. So unless you are a Leo Rising, your Sun isn’t ruling your first house of self, and yes, the sign of the Sun for Leo risings will further colour that.

But let’s say you are a Gemini; Mercury consequently rules you, not the Sun. Therefore, unless your Sun has something else with it, such as another planet or two or three (especially when it’s with the ruler of the Ascendant), or it’s in an angular position, your Sun may not be referring to who you are, and instead, could be masculine energy such as your father or where you go after knowledge and a search for longing, or having some recognition.
It may not correspond to your personality at all. It could be more of an external energy, especially when it’s ruling houses 7th through 12th, which are more social/public (this includes the 8th and 12th houses as they relate to other people’s resources and the media, respectively).

With Leo risings, I would pretty much say every Leo Rising resonates with both the Leo rising and whatever sign their Sun is.

3) If you were born at night (meaning your Sun is below the horizon), the Moon was the body that was giving off the substantial light (it is “the luminary of sect” in Astro jargon) at your time of birth; therefore, you generally relate more to it.

That’s not to say that we can’t resonate with both our Sun and Moon. I definitely do feel like my Leo Sun and Scorpio Moon, which translates into an intense leader.

4) The fourth reason you might not resonate with your Sun sign is that your Sun might be heavily aspected. Aspects are the angles between planets delineating the types of conversations they have with each other. This is how we tell the story and can say how one area of life is mixing with another.

If your Sun has a dozen aspects to it, it will complicate that energy a ton, generally with difficulty, which may colour the pure expression of that sign. This isn’t good or bad, but for example, I have my Sun conjunct the South Node, which tones down that typical “show off, look at me, look at me!” Leo energy (I don’t like taking pictures of myself very often, nor do I like filming videos, maybe I’ll get into a few reels on Instagram, and that’s it).
I do, however, am very attached to virtues such as courage, honour, and nobility (the positive side of Leo).

My Sun is also squaring Pluto, which does show tendencies towards being aware of manipulation or having power struggles with people.

Anyways, if you have fairly aggressive voracious aspects to it or conjunctions, it could change or mitigate the pure expression of that sign.

5) The fifth reason is that you may have a ton of planets in another sign called a “stellium”. If you have three or more inner planets (the Sun through Saturn) in one sign, there’s a huge amount of energy going to that sign, and it may mean that you really resonate with that sign.

So, if you have three or more planets in one sign, you might find that you’re interacting on the basis of those planets through the lens of that sign. Because planets are actors, signs are the lens or the role that they’re playing, and houses are the area of life that they’re playing that role in. Aspects are the way that the characters are having the storyline together.

I don’t count the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. I definitely don’t count the nodes of the Moon (the North and South Node are karmic mathematical points).

Those are generational or transpersonal, and having those in an area of your life won’t show that your behaviour is of those signs. It will rather that you share common generational themes about what those planets mean in those signs.

For example, Uranus in Capricorn during my generation was very much about changing governmental and business structures; we’re the ones who are currently calling out the shortcomings of excessive bureaucracy.

To conclude, horoscopes have nothing to do with resonance. Forecasting events has nothing to do with what you relate to; it has to do with the skeleton of your chart. Personality quizzes are what has to do with resonance.

You can relate to anything in your ancestry and your identity, but if you’re at the doctor’s office, your metrics matter, and that’s what the rising sign is. It’s literally the skeletal backbone of what you’re reading your chart from. So when we read a GENERAL horoscope (not your personal horoscope based on your birth chart that a professional astrologer can thoroughly analyse), it has nothing to do with your personality. It has to do with the order and sequence of life events and areas, which is set off by the rising sign.

I hope that this helped. Let me know in the comments (yes, we’re back to the simple comment box, so get talkative!) if you do or don’t resonate with your Sun sign and found some of the reasons I mentioned above useful.

What usually happens when people don’t relate to their Sun/Zodiac sign is that they won’t look any further into astrology and dismiss it altogether. That’s why writing this article is essential.

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