While your natal ascendant is significant throughout your life, it does progress one degree per year. This progression shows how your view of life and way of relating to the world continues to evolve.
This change over to the next degree happens at the same time every year. This is your external new year and it shows when you start a new focus for how you look at life. To find out when it happens you need to do a little bit of math. It’s easy though.
If this feels stressful to you, skip it. There’s so much to learn about astrology and as you’re learning, take in what feeds your curiosity and lights you up.
For the daring, let’s continue.
One degree = 60 minutes
One year = 12 months
One degree per year = 60 minutes per year.
That’s the same as 5 minutes per month. So your ascendant progresses 5 minutes per month.
Look at the minutes of your ascendant, see how many minutes to get to the next degree and divide by 5. That gives you the number of months. Add that to your birth month and you have your external new year.
Let’s ballpark some examples:
Example 1: Say you were born in January and you have 14 degrees and 28 minutes on the ascendant (doesn’t matter the rising sign)
With 28 minutes on the ascendant that means it takes 32 minutes to get to the next degree. Divide that by 5 and you get about 6 months. Add 6 months to January and you get June. Your external new year is early summer.
Example 2: Say you were born in November and you have 10 degrees and 15 minutes on the ascendant. It takes 45 minutes to get to the next degree (60-15=45). Since 45 divided by 5 is 9 we add 9 months to November and get August for your external new year.
Example 3: Say you were born in July with 18 degrees and 44 minutes on your ascendant. You’ve got 16 minutes to the next degree. That’s about 3 months. Your external new year is October.
💫 In this post we are looking at your external new year based on the ascendant. It is one of three annual cycles that show in your progressed natal cart. The other two are based on your sun and midheaven.
💫 We’ll get into how the others are calculated and what each progressed degree means another time. For now, looking at when your ascendant makes this annual shift can help you to see why starting new projects seems to be easier certain times of the year and harder at other times.
💫 About a month or so leading up to the shift is a great time to come to closure on projects versus starting new ones. It doesn’t mean you can’t start something new near the end of a cycle, it means that you have more momentum towards closure than new starts.
It’s a great time to finish things up, make decisions on stuff you’ve been mulling over, clear the air with people, clear out clutter, purge, and gear up for a new year.
💫 Try not to get hung up on a specific date. You are looking for a time period of when you shift to the next cycle. Notice we are looking at a month for your new year, not a day. This is about looking at an energetic shift that happens over a period of time.
Let me know if you calculate yours and if you notice anything about this time of year for you 💖✨
