Anaretic Degree (29°) and 0° in Astrology: Meaning and Myths

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The anaretic degree is 29° of a sign: any placement from 29°00' to 29°59', the last whole degree before the next sign begins. 0° is the first whole degree of a sign, 0°00' to 0°59'. It sits on the other side of the same sign line and is discussed here alongside 29°, but 0° is not anaretic. The word belongs to 29° only.

Both degrees attract strong claims online. This page explains what the terms mean, how to read them in a chart, how often they actually turn up, and why birth time and the slow planets change the picture. The figures come from one offline run of the routines behind the free chart.

The results in brief:

• At least one of the ten bodies from the Sun to Pluto was at 29° in 28.3% of 20,000 sampled instants, and at 0° in 28.2%.
• Either 29° or 0°, or both, turned up in 49.2% of the instants. About half of the sampled moments had one.
• Each body on its own was at 29° about 3% of the time, close to the one degree in 30 you would expect. The Sun was at 29° in 3.4% of instants.
• A slow planet at 29° can be shared by large cohorts over multi-week intervals. Saturn sat at 29° Taurus on 39 separate dates in 2000 and 2001, across three stretches.
• Without a birth time, a 0° or 29° label is often unsafe for the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Mars, because their displayed degree changes during most dates.

Each figure describes sampled moments of the sky. None of it is a share of people.

Calculator note: the free birth chart shows each placement's sign, degree and minute, so a 29° or 0° placement is visible in its planet table. It does not flag, score or interpret 29° or 0°, and it has no anaretic setting. The figures on this page were calculated offline for this article with the same routines the free chart uses, as described on the methodology page. Ask the Astrologist is given your placements by sign (and house, when the birth time is known), not by degree, and it has no anaretic rule or score; if you want to talk about a 29° or 0° placement, tell it the degree.

What the terms mean

29° (anaretic). In modern astrology, a planet or point at 29°00' to 29°59' of a sign is said to be at the anaretic degree. The term is used for the last displayed whole degree of every sign, so there are twelve anaretic degrees around the zodiac, one per sign.

0° (not anaretic). A placement at 0°00' to 0°59' is in the first displayed whole degree of its sign. Some astrologers give it its own name or reading, but it is a separate topic. A planet at 0° Leo is not anaretic and is not "partly Cancer".

Critical degrees are a different idea. Some traditions keep separate lists of so-called critical degrees, and those lists vary by tradition. "Critical degree" is not another name for the anaretic degree, and this page does not use such lists.

This page makes no claim about how old the modern anaretic idea is. It describes how the term is used today.

One numbering trap

Astrologist.com reads degrees exactly as the chart displays them: "29°" means 29°00' through 29°59', and "0°" means 0°00' through 0°59'. Some writers say "the 29th degree" instead. Counted strictly as an ordinal, the first degree of a sign is 0°00' to 0°59', so the 29th degree would be 28°00' to 28°59' and 29°xx would be the 30th. Popular astrology usually means 29°xx when it says "29th degree", but the wording is ambiguous. From here on this page uses displayed degrees only.

Reading 29° and 0° on the free chart

The planet table under the wheel lists each body as degree, minutes and sign symbol, for example 29°31' ♉. Read the whole-degree number before the degree sign:

• 29 followed by any minutes from 00 to 59: the anaretic degree of that sign.
• 0 followed by any minutes: the first degree of that sign.
• Anything from 1 to 28: neither.

The sign shown is the sign. A planet at 29°59' Cancer is in Cancer until its calculated longitude reaches 0° Leo. There is no blending with the next sign, no "almost Leo" and no early influence from Leo. The same goes for a planet at 0°00' Leo: it is in Leo, not half in Cancer.

The Ascendant is a special case. The free chart names your Rising sign and draws the Ascendant on the wheel, but it does not print the Ascendant's degree, and with no reliable birth time there is no Ascendant at all. Ascendant degree vs rising sign covers early and late Ascendant degrees and how quickly they move with the birth time.

29° and 0° are not decans either, although each sits at the edge of one: 29° is the last degree of a sign's third decan and 0° the first degree of its first decan. Decans in astrology explains that separate ten-degree division, and how to find your decan uses the same degree reading.

How common 29° and 0° are

For any one body, 29° is one whole degree out of 30 in a sign, so a rough expectation is about one chance in 30, a little over 3%, and the same for 0°. The sample confirms that intuition and shows what it adds up to for a whole chart.

How it was measured

• Sample. 20,000 instants at whole-minute resolution, drawn uniformly at random across 1 January 1920 to 31 December 2059 by a fixed, reproducible rule (the seed is recorded with the run).
• Bodies. The ten bodies from the Sun to Pluto, as calculated by the free chart's own routines. The Lunar Nodes, Chiron and the Ascendant are left out.
• Place. One fixed location whose clock is Universal Time. Sign and degree of the planets do not depend on where on Earth you stand, so one place is enough; houses and angles play no part.
• Classification. By the displayed whole degree, exactly as the chart table shows it.

What the sample found

Body by body, every one of the ten landed at 29° in between 3.0% and 3.5% of the instants, and at 0° in between 2.9% and 3.6%:

The small differences between bodies are what a sample of this size produces, plus the particular sign changes the slow planets happened to make in this window. They are not a ranking. The figures are sampled moments, not people: births are not spread evenly over time, so these are not statements about how many people have a placement.

Do not multiply per-body chances together as if the planets were independent dice. Mercury and Venus stay close to the Sun, and the slow planets hold the same degree for days or weeks, so a simple formula is only a rough guide. The sample is the measured figure.

The plain message is the base rate. A chart with something at 29° or 0° is ordinary. In this sample, about half of all chart moments had one.

Ruben's example chart (London, 5 January 1993, 12:00), used across this site, has no body from the Sun to Pluto at 29° or 0°.

Slow planets: a degree shared by a whole cohort

A fast body passes through 29° quickly. A slow one can stay there for weeks, and a retrograde turn near the sign line can bring it back to 29° more than once.

Worked example 1: Saturn at 29° Taurus. The rule, fixed before searching: check every day at 12:00 UT from 1 January 2000 onward, take the first of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Pluto to show 29°, and list every date on which it shows 29° of that same sign. Saturn came first, at 29° Taurus, on 26 July 2000. Checked at noon UT each day, it showed 29° Taurus on these dates:

That is 39 dates across nine months. On the first and last date of each stretch the degree changes during the day, so those edge dates depend on the time. Inside a stretch the result is stable: on 2 August 2000, the date in the first stretch nearest the middle of the degree, Saturn showed 29°29' Taurus at 00:00 UT, 29°31' at 12:00 and 29°33' at 23:59.

People born while Saturn was actually within 29° Taurus during those stretches, wherever they were born, share the placement. On the full-day interior dates it holds for every birth time; the edge dates remain time-dependent. That is a cohort placement, not a personal mark, which is one reason this site does not treat it as a warning sign. Saturn's next pass through 29° Taurus in this window came about 29 years later, on 8 dates in May 2030.

How long each planet stays in a sign is measured on how long each planet stays in a sign, and the birth-year side of slow sign changes is on slow-planet sign changes and your birth year.

A fast body checked across the whole day

Worked example 2: Mars at 0° Scorpio. The rule, fixed before searching: in Amsterdam local time, from 1 January 2000 onward, take the first date on which Mars shows 0° of the same sign at every hourly check from 00:00 to 23:00 and at 23:59, at least five minutes of arc inside the degree at both ends of the day. The first such date was 24 December 2000.

Mars stays at 0° Scorpio all day, so for a birth on that date in Amsterdam, Mars at 0° Scorpio holds whatever the time. The fictional example time used here is 12:00, and the full-day check shows the label does not depend on it. The same date shows why the check matters for other bodies: the Sun moves from 2° to 3° Capricorn during the day, Mercury from 1° to 2° Capricorn, Venus through three whole degrees of Aquarius and the Moon through fourteen whole degrees of Sagittarius. One day earlier, Mars itself changed from Libra to Scorpio during the date, so a birth on 23 December 2000 could have Mars at 29° Libra or 0° Scorpio depending on the time.

When the birth time is unknown

This is not only a Moon problem. Any body can change its displayed degree during a date, and if a 0° or 29° label holds for part of a date but not all of it, the date alone cannot settle it.

To measure this, every 20th date from 1920 to 2059 (2,557 dates) was checked at every hour and at 23:59, using the same routines and a Universal Time clock:

Apart from the Moon, the right-hand column rests on about 160 to 280 qualifying dates per body, so read it as rounded.

So the slow planets usually keep their degree through a whole date, but not always: even Pluto changed its displayed degree on about one date in fifty. The fast bodies rarely do. A Sun at 29° on an unknown-time chart is, in almost every case, a Sun that might have been at 28° or at 0° of the next sign at another hour of the same date.

What that means in practice:

• No Ascendant degree without a reliable birth time. The free chart leaves the Ascendant out when the time is unknown, and so does any 0° or 29° reading of it.
• The noon position is not a birth time. With the time unknown, the free chart calculates the planets at local noon as an internal reference and shows their degrees. It marks the Moon as approximate, but it does not warn when another body's degree changes during the date.
• Check the whole date before using a 0° or 29° label. As a quick first check, enter the date twice with a time filled in, at 00:00 and at 23:59 local time. If the body shows a different sign or whole degree at the two ends, the label is time-sensitive. If both ends match, that is a good sign but not by itself proof for the whole day: a body near a degree boundary or near a retrograde or direct turn (Mercury, Venus and Mars turn too, not only the slow planets) can cross the line and come back within the same date. In those cases, or before making a firm all-day claim, check several times in between as well, as the Mars example above does.

With a known birth time, the question becomes how precise that time is. How accurate your birth time needs to be covers that for the Moon and the angles, and what a chart without a birth time can still show covers the rest of an unknown-time chart. The Sun's own change of sign, and the dates on which it happens, are on born on the cusp.

How astrologers read 29° and 0°

Readings of these degrees are astrological conventions, not measured effects. Where they are used, they are usually framed like this:

• 29°, in the reading some astrologers give it, shows the sign's themes in a closing or completing phase: the last stretch of the sign before the next one begins.
• 0°, in the reading some astrologers give it, shows the sign's themes at a fresh start: the first stretch of a newly entered sign.

Both readings are tendencies and images, not facts about a person. On Astrologist.com the planet still says what, the sign says how, the house says where and aspects describe how planets interact. A degree at the edge of a sign adds at most a small shading to that.

What this site does not claim about 29° or 0°:

• Not a crisis or a fate marker. Neither degree predicts a crisis, a loss, an illness, a death, an accident or any other event, and neither is a karmic debt or a "last chance".
• Not stronger, weaker or more evolved. Neither degree is objectively more powerful, more mature or more important than any other degree of the sign.
• Not a sign of talent or of a problem. A 29° or 0° placement does not mark someone as gifted, wounded, unfinished or behind.
• Not urgent. Nothing about a 29° placement has to be resolved quickly.
• Not a blend. 29° Cancer is Cancer and 0° Leo is Leo.

Checking your own chart

1. Open the free birth chart and enter your birth date, place and, if you have it, time.
2. In the planet table, look for any body whose whole degree reads 29 or 0. If there is none, that is the more common half of the sample.
3. If your birth time is unknown or only approximate, rerun the chart at 00:00 and 23:59 of your birth date, or at both ends of your time window, and keep only the 0° or 29° labels that hold at both; for a body near a degree boundary or a retrograde or direct turn, check a few times in between as well.
4. For a slow planet at 29° or 0°, remember that a large group of people born around the same weeks share it.
5. Read the planet in its sign and house first. If you want to talk a 29° or 0° placement through, you can ask the Astrologist and tell it the degree. More on signs is in the zodiac signs guide.

Related articles

• Born on the Cusp?
• Decans in Astrology
• What Decan Am I? How to Find Your Decans
• Ascendant Degree vs Rising Sign
• How Accurate Does Your Birth Time Need to Be?
• How Long Does Each Planet Stay in a Sign?
• Slow-Planet Sign Changes and Your Birth Year
• Birth Chart Without Birth Time
• Zodiac Signs