Cheiro's Book of Numbers

If you were born in January, it is tempting to call January your month number 1. Cheiro would stop you right there. His months are not the calendar's at all.

For him the year begins on 21 March, when the Sun crosses the spring equinox and enters Aries. From that moment the Sun walks through the twelve signs of the zodiac, thirty degrees each, and every stretch of that walk is a "period" belonging to one planet and one number.

And the first period is not a 1. Aries, from 21 March to 19 April, is ruled by Mars and carries the 9, the number Cheiro gives to physical force in every form. The year opens with a fighter, not a beginner.

Cheiro pictures the heavens as machinery. The Earth turns once a day, the Moon circles in twenty-eight days, the Sun works through the zodiac in a year, and the whole mechanism is "exactly like the hour-hand, minute-hand and second-hand of a clock."

He takes the image right down to the teeth. The Sun appears to move one degree of the zodiac roughly every four minutes; 360 degrees at four minutes each is 1,440 minutes, which is one day. About thirty days carry it across a whole sign, a slower wheel turning.

Each time a tooth catches, he says, a new set of influences comes to bear on the earth. That is the logic of the whole chapter: wheels within wheels of time, and a number for every turn.

In Cheiro's scheme, the first period of the solar year carries the number 9 rather than the number 1.

True✓Correct answer

True. The year starts when the Sun enters Aries on 21 March, and Aries is Mars's period, the "period of the number 9". The 1 does not arrive until the Sun reaches Leo in late July.

Follow the Sun from the equinox and the first half of the year reads like this.

Aries, 21 March to 19 April: Mars, number 9. Taurus, 20 April to 20 May: Venus, number 6. Gemini, 21 May to 20 June: Mercury, number 5. Cancer, 21 June to 20 July: the Moon, written 2–7. Leo, 21 July to 20 August: the Sun, written 1–4.

Notice what the numbers are doing. They do not count upward; they drop, 9, 6, 5, and then land on the two lights of the sky, Moon and Sun, at midsummer. The number belongs to the planet, never to the position in the year. Taurus is the second period, yet its number is 6, because 6 is Venus.

After Leo the order folds back on itself. Virgo, 21 August to 20 September, returns to Mercury and the 5. Libra, 21 September to 20 October, returns to Venus and the 6. Scorpio, 21 October to 20 November, returns to Mars and the 9: the three planets of spring, in mirror order.

Then the slow outer planets take the winter. Sagittarius, 21 November to 20 December, is Jupiter's 3. Capricorn, 21 December to 20 January, and Aquarius, 21 January to 19 February, both belong to Saturn's 8. Pisces, 19 February to 20 March, closes the circle with Jupiter's 3 again.

Laid out whole, the year is a pattern folded around midsummer and midwinter, and it brings you straight back to Aries and the 9.

A woman born on 5 January asks which number her birth period carries. By Cheiro's table, what is it?

• 1, because January is the first month of the calendar
• 10, because Capricorn is the tenth sign after Aries
• 3, because Jupiter rules the turn of the winter year
• 8, because she was born in Saturn's period of Capricorn✓Correct answer

5 January falls in Capricorn, 21 December to 20 January, which Saturn rules with the number 8. Cheiro numbers each period by its planet, never by its place in the calendar or its count from Aries.