Astrology Trivia
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This astrology trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers and covers the zodiac from every angle: the twelve signs and their symbols, the four elements and three modalities, ruling planets old and new, the ascendant and the houses, and Ophiuchus, the thirteenth constellation astrologers leave out. It also digs into the history: the Babylonians who first sliced the sky into twelve, Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, John Dee and Elizabeth I, Kepler moonlighting as a court astrologer, the first newspaper horoscope column, and the astrologer Nancy Reagan hid in the White House. There is a round on the Chinese zodiac and Hindu Jyotisha, and a few questions on the science side: the 1985 Nature test, the Barnum effect, and what "Mercury retrograde" actually is. It works for a horoscope-loving group chat and for the sceptic in it. Difficulty is marked on every question. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on astrology, the zodiac and the signs, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sign begins the astrological year at the March equinox?
Aries
Aries still opens the zodiac at the March equinox, yet the Sun no longer stands among its stars that day: a slow wobble of Earth's axis has carried the equinox point into a neighbouring constellation.
Q 02The word zodiac comes from a Greek phrase meaning what?
Circle of little animals
Circle of little animals is the literal sense of the Greek zodiakos kyklos, a name that stuck because most of the star figures along the Sun's yearly route are beasts.
Q 03Which planet's 'retrograde' spells, three or four times a year, get blamed by astrologers for garbled messages and tech glitches?
Mercury
Mercury takes the blame because astrologers give the messenger god's planet charge of communication, travel and contracts; each backward spell lasts about three weeks.
Q 04Which companion to Ptolemy's Almagest served as the standard handbook of Western astrology for over a thousand years?
Tetrabiblos
Tetrabiblos was Ptolemy's defence of astrology as a real but inexact art: easily mistaken, he admitted, yet too useful to throw out just because forecasts sometimes fail.
Q 05Horoscopic astrology, with its individual birth charts, is thought to have emerged in which city where Babylonian and Egyptian ideas met?
Alexandria
Alexandria, founded after Alexander the Great took Egypt, is where astrologers are credited with joining the Babylonian zodiac to Egypt's 36 decans, ten-degree slices of the sky.
Q 06Which Roman orator's attack on astrology in De Divinatione anticipated modern arguments against pseudoscience?
Cicero
Cicero argued that the planets are almost limitlessly far away, so they can hardly shape a newborn, and that people born at the very same instant still end up with different characters and fates.
Q 07In Western astrology, a birthday on 1 September falls under which sign?
Virgo
Virgo runs from about 23 August to 22 September, yet on 1 September the Sun actually sits among the stars of the constellation before it, because the signs are tied to the seasons while the star figures have drifted.
Q 08People born right on the boundary between two zodiac signs are said to be born 'on the' what?
Cusp
Cusp comes from the Latin for a point, and many astrologers say nobody is really a blend of two signs: the Sun is in one or the other at any instant, so an exact birth time settles it.
Q 09Astrology sorts the signs into three modalities: cardinal, fixed and which other?
mutable
Mutable signs fall at the end of each season, when the weather is turning, which is why astrologers cast them as the adaptable ones; cardinal signs open a season and fixed signs hold its middle.
Q 10Which sign is symbolised by a pair of scales, the only inanimate object among the twelve?
Libra
Libra is the only lifeless emblem, and the ancient Greeks saw no scales there at all: they drew its stars as the Scorpion's claws, and its two brightest stars still carry Arabic names meaning southern and northern claw.
Q 11Which sign is depicted as a centaur drawing a bow?
Sagittarius
Sagittarius is Latin for archer, and the star figure's arrow is aimed at the red star Antares, the heart of the Scorpion next door; one of its stars is still called Alnasl, Arabic for arrowhead.
Q 12Which planet is the traditional ruler of Aries?
Mars
Mars rules Aries, yet the matching names are a coincidence: Aries is simply Latin for ram, while Ares was the Greek name for the war god the Romans called Mars.
Q 13Which sign is ruled by the Sun itself?
Leo
Leo was given the Sun, Ptolemy explained, because the Sun passes through it in the hottest weeks of the northern summer, so the most powerful light was matched with the season of greatest heat.
Q 21Newspaper horoscopes are usually based on which single factor at the moment of a reader's birth?
The Sun's position
The Sun's position is the one chart factor a birthday alone fixes, so a columnist can address a twelfth of all readers at once; a full chart also needs the exact time and place of birth.
Q 22R. H. Naylor's horoscope for which royal, born in August 1930, led to Britain's first regular newspaper astrology column?
Princess Margaret
Princess Margaret was three days old when the Sunday Express ran it, and Naylor foresaw events of tremendous importance to the royal family near her seventh year; at six she saw her uncle abdicate and her father become king.
Q 23Which October 1930 event seemed to fulfil astrologer R. H. Naylor's printed warning about a British aircraft?
Q 14Which sign took Pluto as its "modern" ruler after the planet's discovery?
Scorpio
Scorpio's modern ruler carries its myth with it: because Pluto is named for the Roman god of the underworld, astrologers tie the planet to death, rebirth and whatever lies below the surface.
Q 15Despite its name and its jug-pouring emblem, Aquarius belongs to which of astrology's four elements?
Air
Air is Aquarius's element: astrologers cast the water-bearer as a thinker pouring out ideas for the whole community, and leave the water signs to stand for private feeling.
Q 16Between the Scorpion and the Archer, the Sun's yearly path also crosses which thirteenth constellation?
Ophiuchus
Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer, actually holds the Sun longer than its famous neighbour: about 18 days from the end of November, against roughly a week for the Scorpion.
Q 17Which word for a great misfortune comes from the Italian for 'ill-starred', a relic of astrological belief?
Disaster
Disaster joins a prefix meaning ill to astro, the Italian for star, and the same belief named an illness: influenza is Italian for 'influence', because epidemics were once blamed on the stars.
Q 18Astrologers say the slow drift of the equinox is now ushering in the 'Age of' which zodiac sign?
Aquarius
Aquarius comes next because the equinox point slides backwards through the zodiac, about one constellation every 2,150 years, though by astronomers' star maps the crossing is still centuries away.
Q 19Which 1967 musical popularised the idea of a dawning new astrological age?
Hair
Hair took the stars seriously: the company kept its own astrologer, who chose the opening nights, Broadway's included.
Q 20In a birth chart, the zodiac sign on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth is called what?
ascendant
Ascendant, or rising sign, changes about every two hours as the Earth turns, so two people born on the same day can have different ones, which is why astrologers ask for an exact birth time.
The R101 airship crash
The R101 airship crash in France on 5 October was taken as proof of his gift, although the warning he printed had named the week of 8 to 15 October; the Sunday Express gave him a weekly column all the same.
Q 24Which First Lady secretly employed astrologer Joan Quigley after the 1981 attempt on her husband's life?
Nancy Reagan
Nancy Reagan wanted safe days for the president's appearances after he was shot, and the secret held until 1988, when ousted chief of staff Donald Regan wrote that her astrologer's warnings had shaped the White House schedule.
Q 25British intelligence hired the horoscope writer Louis de Wohl in WWII to work out what?
What Hitler's astrologers advised
What Hitler's astrologers advised was the brief, since de Wohl insisted the Führer planned by the stars; in 1941 he was sent to America instead, to tell the press that the heavens foretold a Nazi defeat.
Q 26Which astronomer served as personal astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I?
John Dee
John Dee is credited with picking her coronation day, 15 January 1559, by casting a chart for the most favourable moment; under her sister Mary he had been arrested for calculating the royal horoscopes.
Q 27Which great astronomer worked as court astrologer to the Habsburgs?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler advised Emperor Rudolf II on astrology as imperial mathematician, yet he called it the foolish little daughter of respectable astronomy.
Q 28A 1985 double-blind test, in which 28 astrologers matched birth charts to personality profiles, appeared in which British journal?
Nature
Nature published it that December: handed a birth chart and three personality profiles, one of them genuine, the astrologers picked no better than guessing, and the physicist in charge had begun the work as a Berkeley undergraduate.
Q 29Accepting vague personality descriptions as uniquely accurate, as horoscope readers often do, is known as which effect?
Barnum
Barnum, the circus showman, lent his name in 1956, when psychologist Paul Meehl mocked personality reports vague enough to fit anybody; people shown such a write-up tend to rate it as a striking likeness.
Q 30Bertram Forer's 1948 students rated a 'personal' sketch from an astrology book as highly accurate; what was the catch?
All got the same one
All got the same one, stitched from lines such as 'You have a tendency to be critical of yourself'; Forer put the high marks down to gullibility, since such statements fit almost anyone.