- guardian.co.uk, Sunday December 29 2002 11.45 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday December 29 2002
Libra
Librans hate choices (unless making them on someone else's behalf), so here's one for 2003. Do you want to play the role of Libra the lounge-lizard and love-bug, or Libra the campaigning visionary and contrary type who likes to give sleeping dogs a sly kick to make life more interesting?
Although, as usual, you'll doubtless find a way to play both sides of the wire, your choices tend to diminish the longer the year rolls on. February and March is an optimum spell for lovers, as your Venus ruler encourages your tendency to treat every passing fancy as a potential follow-up to Dr Zhivago. For late Librans (after 20 October), such romanticism might even be justified.
For Libran party animals comes the merry month of May, a lust, rather than love, stricken month, when Mars will awaken your physical appetites or at the very least pack your social calendar.
Yet by Midsummer professional achievement will start to look more interesting than the latest infatuation or shopping trip. The slow transit of Saturn through the most public sector of your 'scope marks a two-year patch when your ambitions can turn into reality, albeit only through the Saturnian virtues of responsibility and graft. If you see yourself as a leader, the second half of the year is the time to start negotiating messy professional politics in earnest.
If you were born in 1973-74, or 1980-81, Saturn's shift makes the second half of the year a time of particular reckoning, when the tough decision is likely to be the right one. Time to be the dynamic Scales, not lazy Libra.
While you apply yourself to Saturn's patient process, other, more immediate routes up the greasy pole are on offer. Until September, the presidential planet Jupiter remains on hand to amplify your networking skills (no-one has better), and keep you in good company. The same planet will blur the line between friendship and romance - as you are oh-so-prone to do - and deliver you giddy summer affairs, should you be interested (and which Libran isn't?).
By your birthday, the shape of your professional future will be sharper than in years, and your appetite for challenge awakened. It might take a little longer for your personal life to become as focused, thanks to the two slow-moving planets of Uranus and Neptune dragging their heels until later in the autumn. While affairs that sputtered out in the spring of 2003 might rekindle next autumn, even committed romantics of the sort only Libra produces can't keep clutching torches forever. Determined lounge lizards can get in a season of posing; the rest of you should be too busy achieving.
Scorpio
Intensity is Scorpio's thing. The need for complete commitment and grand passion applies not just to your romantic life but to all your undertakings. Work, love or the cookery course: if it's not a full-on affair, why bother?
The planetary set-up of recent months should have stoked your inner fires and roused your ambitions to make a mark on the world. You enter 2003 with your ruling planet, Mars the warrior, still marching through your sign, enforcing your iron will on whomever dares to cross it. How long can you maintain this level of fervour? Scarily for the rest of us, through much of 2003.
You can, however, expect a dip in your energies for a couple of months after Mars changes sign on 17 January. You'll need the rest. From springtime until the end of the year, the pleasure and creativity sector of your 'scope is under continuous activation, putting a zing into your love life and your friendships. Since this is also the area concerned with children and self-expression, you can expect your kids, should you have any, to be a particular handful. If you're the artistic type, you can follow your fellow Scorpio Pablo Picasso (talk about intensity and sexuality!), and move from your Blue to your Cubist period.
The culprits for your outbreak of wanton self-exhibition are the wild card planet Uranus and your trusty, lusty Mars ruler. From June, the red planet is plying back and forth in your fifth house for a rare six months, a time when you can get yourself into some seriously deep (and seriously hot) water.
As if this wasn't enough, your career remains in a period of enlargement throughout the year, thanks to Jupiter, the planet of big shots and big ideas, sailing across the roof of your personal skies. Until April, Jupiter asks you to consolidate recent gains. Thereafter, you will be granted ample opportunity to rub shoulders with presidents and power-brokers. Don't screw up, especially during July/August, when the heat from the professional kitchen gets turned up.
Saturn amplifies the year's Jupiterian theme, making this a challenging but achieving time for Scorpios in education, publishing, travel or legal lines.
Downsides? Only these: Scorpio is the sign of self-undoing, and jams in which you land yourself will be of your own making. That chilly, vengeful mood you get into is to be avoided, especially during August/September.
Secondly, although Scorpio is the sign of transformation, you like to take things stubbornly to the wire before you succumb to the need for a change. With two lunar eclipses in your sign in 2003, don't wait until critical mass is reached before leaving the past behind and shedding another skin.
Sagittarius
Being at the epicentre of major planetary alignments over the past year - or more accurately, the past 18 months - the sign of the Centaur has seen more than its share of upheaval. With eclipses and a thankfully rare Saturn-Pluto opposition rocking your relationship axis, survival rather than joie de vivre has been the theme, notably for Archers born in early December.
The upward arc into sunnier pastures that began in August, when your ruling planet Jupiter came onside for you, continues in 2003. January is your second birthday, when Venus lends you poise. February finds you at your most forceful and uncompromising - exploit your professional and personal contacts at this time, but let your intimate partners off the hook. You may not be as easy to live with as you imagine.
Scenarios with your spouse, partner or ex (it's been a burn-out couple of years) take a turn for the better after June, when hard-hearted Saturn gets off your case for another seven years or so. Give thanks. The same planet's shift will also get you off the hook with any authority figures that have been terrorising your life for the last year.
Before then, in April and May, when planets light up your party zone, you enjoy a spell when a rich social life spills into your lap without you having to do the chasing - you do, however, have to leave the house to make the most of it. Since you are at one corner of a fiery cosmic triad at this time, triangular affairs are a potential hazard. August, when your fellow fire sign of Leo is at maximum strength, is another romantic hotspot.
Shortly afterwards, your helpful Jupiter ruler shifts to the peak of your chart to present you with the kind of lucky professional break that comes along only every dozen years.
Some inkling of where your career future lies may arrive as early as March. Centaurs born in the earliest few days of the sign are those most likely to have lightbulbs flashing over their heads. They are also those most likely to feel the sudden need to relocate their home or business.
Home and family are an issue given unusual emphasis in all Archers' 'scopes during the latter half of the year, as Mars moves in the builders, turns up the din from the family and has you trading blows with the neighbours about that damn Leylandii hedge. Take it as easy as circumstances allow.
Your birthday season, which opens with a total eclipse of the Sun on 23 November, is unusually fervent. With the perspective for which your sign is celebrated in place, you can transform your personal, and more particularly your professional life, as ruthlessly as you care to.
Capricorn
The Goat is above all a child of Saturn - cautious, pragmatic conservative - but even you are not immune from the contrary moods of your ruling planet. Since your austere ruler is currently sliding backwards in your sixth house, the daily grind remains, temporarily, pressing. Get through to February, however, and the world of work by which you set so much store (it's tantamount to honour and duty in your case) becomes once more the vehicle through which you can exercise your formidable will.
Springtime is exactly that for you. Venus lightens your load in March, while in April and May fiery Mars enables you to scare your colleagues and impress your lovers. May also brings the chance to optimise your financial situation. Though Capricorns worry when they're down to their last million, your fiscal portfolio remains unusually buoyant throughout spring and summer.
Your relationship scenario is more complex. Planets sparking across the most confidential sectors of your 'scope have made recent months a time of deepening intimacy, touching on the place where sex, divinity and the human spirit get intriguingly entangled.
Alliances, romantic or not, that do not nourish and support you, will begin to fall by the wayside after midsummer. Sentimentality, after all, is not a Capricorn vice. While control remains your guiding principle in life, you will need to confront the reality that other people cannot always be coerced into doing the sensible (ie your) thing. Making clear the parameters of your relationships - what both parties expect - is one way to keep things in balance.
Since Saturn is your ruling planet, other problems associated with the planet - authority figures, for example - are diminished. As a Cap, you probably are an authority figure. Nonetheless, if you were born in the winters of 59-60 or 73-74, best keep an especially clean nose at work.
Other planetary signatures are easier. In autumn, Jupiter lends you vision, optimism, and locates long lost lovers in distant corners of the planet, perhaps throwing in an air ticket to India for good measure. The close of the year grants you a career break for which Mars may have kept you on hold for several months.
Since you are an earth sign, the year's oceanic leitmotif chimes sympathetically. Your symbol is sometimes shown as the Sea Goat - half beast, half fish - a reminder that Capricorn is not merely the hard-hearted climber of repute, but a creature in the swim of human tides, who achieves to support the greater good. Carry that weight.
Aquarius
You may be the Urn-Bearer, but that pitcher of human compassion on your shoulder doesn't make you a water sign. Heavens no. Aquarius is all air, the lofty theoretician with the plan that will solve everyone's problems.
Jolly good - but for much of the last 12 months it's the practicalities of human relationships, rather than the theory, which have confronted your sign. Saturn's long transit of your fifth house has been about obligations to and from your romantic partners, and about the mundane arrangements of love affairs, rather than the rosey-hued aspects of lu-u-rve. For some, it's been a case of commit or quit.
While Aquarians born in the last week of the sign, or in 1962 or '64, may still have such issues to resolve over the next few months (in February especially), the mood surrounding your love life is lighter in 2003, especially after June. Singleton Aquarians can ring March and June as months of happy hunting for romantic prey, and if clandestine encounters are your cup of meat, autumn looks particularly inviting.
Partnerships of all kinds continue to be elevated by the presence of Jupiter in your opposite sign of Leo. Whether your spouse or legal sidekick is really bringing home the bacon - they seem so confident - you have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, you, as ever, have your own thing to do. The professional show you've had to put on over recent months will need to be maintained until after your birthday, when you're granted a welcome stay of absence from public duties for a month or two. Until then, meetings, plans and contacts are all fruitful, even if your bank account may have to wait six months to see the fruits of your efforts.
If you share the zest for social justice for which your sign is celebrated, this is likely to feature strongly in your affairs in the early part of the year. The fierce force of Mars will put you atop the barricades waving the flag of freedom, but when putting the world to rights, try to ensure you're not indulging your tendency to fight yesterday's battles.
On that subject, the departure of the futuristic planet Uranus from Aquarius in March will make your sign that little bit less cutting edge. Your personal age of Aquarius isn't over yet, but from here on, you're marginally less kooky than over the last seven years (I did say marginally).
Uranus' brief re-visitation of your sign in the last three months of the year is significant for birthdays between 16-19 February, who get to revisit issues in play right now. After December, you'll have to wait another 78 years for Uranus to revisit your sign. Might as well get that little bit crazy now.
Pisces
Pisceans must get tired of being depicted as wet, weak and weepy (there there), when their sign's fast-flowing responsiveness is as likely to produce business sharks and artistic dolphins as soppy small-fry. In 2003 you'll be showing the world exactly what kind of fish you are. From your birthday onwards, assorted planets put the emphasis on your sign above all others.
For starters, on 10 March, Uranus, the planet of independence and disruption, splashes down in the Fishes. Since this planet helps flavour the zeitgeist for the next seven years (see introduction), members of your sign should gel with the collective more easily. Birthdays early in the sign get the biggest jolt from the Uranian electrodes, a clear signal to dump half-dead spouses and run off to Alaska with a marine biologist.
For a main course comes Saturn's shift into your kindred water sign of Cancer on 4 June for a two-and-a-half year transit, when those all-over-the-place Piscean emotions acquire some of Saturn's steely qualities. While Saturn gives you greater resilience, it will also ask searching questions about romances, particularly about the dreaded 'c' word - commitment, a quality you'll come to demand from beaus or belles.
Since Saturn is the planet of accomplishment, the next two years is a period of potential achievement, of bringing ideas into reality through steady toil - good for those creative dolphins among you, who not only have a great notion but actually write the damn script.
For afters comes Mars, planet of energy and decision, which wades into your sign on 17 June for an unusually lengthy six-month spell. This is a time to elevate your physical fitness, and chance your arm in non-physical battles.
Finally, Jupiter, the ruler of Pisces, clicks into your opposite number of Virgo for a year from late August. Whether you're hitched, or in a business alliance, this jolly giant will stretch your partnerships into new territory. Whether the other person is your better half or not, issues of them 'needing more space' as California speak has it, are likely to be raised. Since they're lucky on your behalf, let 'em have it.
Although the emphasis during spring and summer is on your web of personal relationships and creativity rather than on the impersonal world of work, Pluto at the top of your 'scope (key birthdays 8-11 March) remains in helpful play for your career, with summer the slackest time for initiatives.
With planets like these, the one certain thing about 2003 is that, unless you're incarnating Pisces the mystic on some rocky promontory (another of your sign's many roles), you can forget the quiet life. From March onwards, you're on call and in demand.
