About this passageWritten for this collection, describing how the Western astrological tradition divides the zodiac by mode. It sets out what practitioners say. Whether the sky describes anything is not a question this note takes a position on.
The twelve signs are sorted three ways, and the one people meet last is mode. Four signs begin a season — Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn — and the tradition calls them cardinal. Four hold the season at its full width. Four dissolve it so the next can start.
What the scheme insists on is that beginning is only one of the three jobs. A year that was all cardinal would be all January: a great deal of starting and nothing brought to term. The tradition treats the holding and the dissolving as work of the same rank, which is not how most calendars are sold.
Read that way, a season of no visible progress is not a failure of the season. It is what the middle of anything looks like from inside it.
Astrologers reading a chart heavy in one mode do not describe it as better or worse. They describe what it will find easy and what it will have to be taught.