Zodiac-sign shift? Horoscope fans aghast

SAN FRANCISCO — Astrologers say they knew this would happen.

But that didn't stop a furious response among horoscope fans as news shot around cyberspace that the world's zodiac signs might be out of whack, a development with potentially life-changing impact on professional and personal relationships and pickup lines in singles' bars.

"Don't panic," Lawrence Grecco, who has worked for 20 years as an astrologer and life coach in Manhattan, assured his clients. "Your sign is your sign."

Such assurances did little to quell the cosmic kerfuffle after The Star Tribune in Minneapolis innocuously reported Sunday that a naturally occurring wobble in the direction of the Earth's axis had altered the alignment of stars from their traditional star signs, which date back several millennia.

That means, Parke Kunkle, an astronomy instructor and a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, told the newspaper, that when astrologers say the sun is in Pisces, it's really in Aquarius, and so on.

"Astronomers have known about this since about 130 B.C.," Kunkle said Friday in his office at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, his phone ringing constantly. (One person had demanded: "Give me my sign back.")

"This is not new news. Almost every astronomy class talks about it."

By the reckoning of Kunkle and other astronomers, astrologers are not only a month off in their zodiac signs, but they are neglecting a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus (Ooh-FEE-yew-kus) the serpent bearer, for those born from Nov. 30 to Dec. 17, making it the unofficial sign of holiday shoppers.

The ancient Babylonians dumped it.

Rob Brezsny, the author of a syndicated weekly horoscope column, said the idea the zodiac was shifting was just another attempt to discredit astrology, in which 1 in 4 Americans profess to believe, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center poll.

Brezsny and other astrologers say they long have known the pairings of constellations and astrological signs don't match, but that Western astrologers don't deal with stars — as some other branches of astrology do — but rather the planets and solar system.

Brezsny and others said their craft would survive the confusion and skeptics, if only because adherents are so passionate. "Astrology is a poetic language of the soul, not a scientific method," he said.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.