Virgo

Virgo at a glance

Symbol

The Maiden

Sun in Virgo

About 23 August to 22 September (exact times vary by year)

Element

Earth

Modality

Mutable

Ruled by

Mercury

Exaltation

Mercury

Detriment

Jupiter

Fall

Venus

Natural house

The 6th house

Opposite sign

Pisces

Which stars make up Virgo?

Virgo is the largest constellation of the zodiac and the second largest in the whole sky. Its brightest star, Spica, is a blue white light low in the south on spring evenings, and its name is Latin for an ear of grain.

Another of its stars, Vindemiatrix, means “the grape harvester”. In ancient Greece it first appeared before dawn in late summer, just as the vintage began.

Where does Virgo come from?

In Babylon this part of the sky was AB.SIN, the Furrow, the goddess Shala holding an ear of barley. The figure has carried grain for three thousand years, which makes Virgo one of the clearest links between the sky and the farming calendar.

Greek myth gave her several names. She was Demeter, goddess of the harvest, or her daughter Persephone. She was also Astraea, goddess of justice and the last of the immortals to leave the earth when humans grew cruel, which is why the scales of Libra hang just beside her.

Virgo holds a quiet place in the history of science. Around 130 BCE, Hipparchus compared his measurement of Spica with one made about 150 years earlier and found the star had shifted relative to the equinox. That was the discovery of precession, the slow wobble that separates signs from constellations.

How does Virgo line up with the real sky?

There are three different versions of every sign. The Earth’s axis wobbles like a slowing spinning top, a full circle about every 25,800 years, and that drags the spring equinox west against the stars by about one degree every 72 years.

Western astrology stays locked to the seasons, Vedic astrology follows the stars, and the two are now 24.2° apart. Hali uses the tropical zodiac because it follows the seasons the signs were named for.

How often is Virgo rising?

The share of each day with Virgo on the Ascendant, and how long it takes to rise, at four latitudes. In London it is the 2nd most common of the 12 rising signs.

Place	Share of the day	Time to rise
Equator	7.7%	112 min
Madrid	10.5%	151 min
London	11.8%	171 min
Reykjavík	14.6%	210 min

Find your rising sign

The rarest rising sign, city by city

How common is Virgo?

In US birth records from 1994 to 2014, 8.92% of babies were born under Virgo, about 89 in every 1,000. That makes Virgo number 2 of 12, where 1 is the most common.

See all 12 signs ranked

When is the Moon next in Virgo?

The Moon is next in Virgo from Tue 3 Nov 08:27 UTC until Thu 5 Nov 14:38 UTC.

The next full moon in Virgo is the Snow Moon, on Saturday 20 February 2027.

Where is the Moon today?

Sources and methods

Tropical and sidereal (Lahiri) dates for 2026 computed by Hali; constellation dates approximate, from IAU boundaries. Babylonian names follow the MUL.APIN star compendium.

Dignities follow Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I. Our data is free to use under CC BY 4.0.