The Sun-Sign Column
The twelve-paragraph column, one paragraph per sign, is what “astrology” means to most people who have never sought it out. It is a twentieth-century commercial format, it exists because of a production constraint, and it is the part of the subject that most working astrologers regard as a debasement of it.
The received account, and the correction
Correction
Commonly saidThe newspaper sun-sign column began on 24 August 1930, when R. H. Naylor wrote a horoscope of the newborn Princess Margaret for the Sunday Express.
The date and the piece are right, and the sentence is nearly right, which is exactly how such claims survive.
On 24 August 1930, three days after the birth of Princess Margaret, the London Sunday Express published a feature by R. H. Naylor on the new princess. It succeeded, Naylor was given further space, and a subsequent forecast concerning aircraft was widely taken as vindicated after an airship disaster that October 1.
But that feature was not a sun-sign column. It was the horoscope of a specific individual, accompanied by forecasts organised by birth-date ranges, which is a different and older newspaper device. The standardised twelve-paragraph, one-per-sign format that the phrase now means is generally dated to about 1937, after several years of experimentation with the presentation.
The correction matters for what it demonstrates more than for the seven-year gap itself. “The sun-sign column began in 1930” is repeated in a great many otherwise careful sources. It is the difference between a fact that has been checked and a fact that has been repeated, and it is a fair test to apply to this site as well.
The date 17 August is also in circulation for the Naylor piece. It is wrong; the feature ran on 24 August 1930 1.
Where the format came from, and why it has that shape
Astrology re-entered the English-language press in the 1820s and 1830s through almanacs and pseudonymous annuals, and the Victorian and Edwardian trade in printed astrology is the immediate commercial ancestor of the newspaper column 2. Two things then changed the product.
The first was industrialisation. From the 1890s, standardised horoscopes were sold by post at low prices, with the interpretive text assembled out of stock paragraphs. That is the direct ancestor of every computer-generated report and every horoscope application.
The second was a printing constraint, and it is the whole explanation of the format. A newspaper needs a column that every reader can use without performing any calculation. The only chart factor derivable from a birth date alone, with no time and no place, is the Sun’s sign. Twelve paragraphs is what a daily astrology feature reduces to once individual calculation is removed, and no other shape was available.
What the technical tradition did instead
No ancient, medieval or early modern astrologer produced anything of this kind. The technical tradition treated the Sun’s sign as one factor among dozens and generally subordinated it to the ascendant, which requires a birth time and a birth place and therefore cannot be printed for a general readership 1.
The gap between the popular product and the technical tradition is the single largest source of misunderstanding about the subject, in both directions: it leads people who dislike astrology to argue against a format that its own practitioners largely disown, and it leads people who like it to assume that the newspaper paragraph is a simplified version of something older, when it is a different object with a different production history. On what the sign in the column is, see Three Reference Frames; for how much of a modern sign profile is twentieth-century, see Virgo.
What has been said about it
Tradition
Held byDane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality, United States, 1936
Rudhyar’s person-centred astrology treats the chart as a symbolic portrait of developmental potential rather than a forecast of events, and the astrologer’s role as closer to a counsellor’s than a prognosticator’s 3. This is the position from which most twentieth-century Anglophone astrology regards the newspaper column, and it is a dated authorial position like any other on this site.
Tradition
Held byTheodor W. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column, Los Angeles, 1957
Adorno’s study of a Los Angeles newspaper column reads the format as an instrument of social adjustment: advice that appears to come from outside the social order while in fact recommending accommodation to it 4. It is the classic critical-theory treatment and, like Rudhyar’s, it is a position held by a named person at a named date.
Testing, and scale
On empirical testing, the most-cited controlled experiment is a double-blind study published in Nature in 1985, which did not find that astrological interpretation matched participants to charts better than chance 5. Its methodology has been contested in the subsequent literature, and reporting a single study as final is poor practice regardless of which way it came out. That contest, and what the testing literature does and does not establish, is set out at Testing Astrology. Why a reading can feel accurate whatever the tests say is a separate question, treated at The Barnum Effect.
On scale: a survey fielded in October 2024 and published in May 2025 found that about 30 per cent of US adults consult astrology, tarot or fortune tellers at least yearly, 28 per cent specifically astrology or horoscopes, and 27 per cent say astrology affects people’s lives, down from 29 per cent in 2017 6. Most of that engagement is not prediction-seeking, and the survey distinguishes consulting from believing.
Gap in the evidence
The 1937 date for the standardised twelve-paragraph format rests on secondary reporting and reference literature rather than on the newspaper issues themselves. It is given here as “generally dated to” and should stay in that form until someone has consulted the originals.
Who first printed a column in the modern twelve-paragraph form, in which paper, is likewise not established here.
References
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume II: The Medieval and Modern Worlds: Continuum, 2009. ISBN 9781441181299 recordscholarly
The companion volume, and the one that carries everything after the fifth century: its own description runs from the collapse of classical astrology to popular astrology in the twentieth century and its standing in the twenty-first. Volume I stops in the ancient and classical world, so a claim about the Renaissance, the Victorian press, the newspaper column or twentieth-century psychological astrology belongs here and not there. Listed by Bloomsbury Academic since Bloomsbury acquired Continuum in 2011; the 2009 printing is Continuum, and the ISBN is unchanged.
- Patrick Curry. A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology. London: Collins & Brown, 1992. find a copy (catalogue search) recordscholarly
Covers the Victorian and Edwardian print astrology out of which the newspaper column grew.
- Dane Rudhyar. The Astrology of Personality: Lucis Publishing, 1936. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
Cited as a historical object rather than as scholarship. Rudhyar fused Theosophy with the depth psychology of Jung and produced the person-centred astrology that underlies most twentieth-century Anglophone practice.
- Theodor W. Adorno. The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column. Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 1957, 2:19-88. find a copy (catalogue search) recordscholarly
Collected in The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. Stephen Crook, Routledge, 1994. The classic critical-theory reading of the newspaper column.
- Shawn Carlson. A double-blind test of astrology. Nature, 1985, 318:419-425. doi:10.1038/318419a0 recordpeer reviewed
The most-cited controlled study. Its methodology has been contested in the subsequent literature, and this site never presents it, or any single study, as final.
- Pew Research Center. 3 in 10 Americans Consult Astrology, Tarot Cards or Fortune Tellers: Pew Research Center, 2025. find a copy (catalogue search) record Accessed 2026-07-28.peer reviewed
Published 21 May 2025; fielded 21-27 October 2024; n = 9,593 US adults. 30 per cent consult at least yearly, 28 per cent astrology or horoscopes; 27 per cent say astrology affects people's lives, down from 29 per cent in 2017.