Taylor Swift Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius, Snake, Open Hour

Sagittarius is settled, and so is the Snake

Taylor Swift was born on 13 December 1989 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Two of the three answers people come for follow from that date alone, before anyone argues about a clock.

The first is the sun sign. The Sun stood at 261.39° of ecliptic longitude at 05:17 that morning and 261.53° at 08:36 — 21.4° inside Sagittarius, which begins at 240°. The next sign boundary was still eight and a half days away. No birth time anywhere in that day moves the answer, because the Sun covers about one degree per day and the day is 24 hours wide.

The second is the Chinese animal. 1989 is 己巳: the sixth heavenly stem (己, Yin Earth) over the sixth earthly branch (巳, the Snake). Chinese years do not turn in December, so a 13 December birth sits more than six weeks from either boundary — the lunar new year on 27 January 1990 and Li Chun on 4 February 1990. The two systems disagree about which of those lines is the year's first day, and it makes no difference here: both put this date inside the same year.

What is left is the hour, and it is not settled.

Why the two zodiac systems agree so often near the solstices

A Western sign starts every 30° of solar longitude. A Chinese month starts at a 節, and the twelve 中气 — the terms that mark the middle of each Chinese month — fall at exactly the same 30° multiples. Sagittarius begins at 240°, which is 小雪. Capricorn begins at 270°, which is 冬至. The boundary is one astronomical event, read twice.

This is why a date in the second half of December is calm in both systems: the sign is fixed by the Sun's position, and the animal is fixed by a year boundary that is months away. The interesting cases are the ones where those lines crowd together — births in the first week of February, where the solar year turns and the lunar year can turn within days of it. 13 December is not one of them.

The crosswalk page on this site shows the same event in all three labels at once — sign, animal, and year pillar — if you want to check your own date rather than hers.

The hour has two published answers

Two times circulate for this birth: 05:17 and 08:36 local time. They are 199 minutes apart — three hours and nineteen minutes — and they land in different hour branches, 卯 and 辰. This is not a rounding difference or a daylight-saving slip. It is two different records.

Astro-Databank, which collects and grades this material, currently carries 08:36 with a Rodden rating of DD: conflicting and unverified. The same entry has also carried the place as Reading and as West Reading. That second disagreement is worth putting in scale — one minute of longitude is four seconds of time — so it changes nothing. The three-hour disagreement is a different kind of problem.

So this page reports both and picks neither. A page that chose one would be inventing the part of the record that is missing.

Where the 05:17 came from, and why it did not settle the question

The 05:17 comes from a 2015 biography of Swift, which describes the birth in narrative detail — a delivery room, a floor of a hospital, a minute of the clock. Detail of that kind reads like evidence. It is not the same thing as evidence: the book gives no source for the time, and the database that indexes the claim says so in its own notes.

This is the ordinary shape of celebrity birth data. A specific, vivid, unsourced number enters circulation, is repeated until it looks established, and then meets a second specific number with a different provenance. Neither becomes wrong. What happens is that the record stops being able to decide, and a rating of DD is the database's way of saying exactly that.

What each time actually produces

Here is the part worth seeing. The two times do not merely rename the hour pillar. Read against a 丁 Day Master, they produce opposite readings of it, and they move the balance of the whole chart.

Seven Killings and Direct Resource are not two shades of the same reading. One is the stem that attacks the Day Master; the other is the stem that feeds it. And because the strength score moves from weak to neutral, every downstream statement that leans on strength — whether the chart wants support or wants draining — flips with it.

One thing does not move: Metal is absent in both readings. That is a fact about the six characters the date fixes, and no hour reaches it.

The correction is one minute. The disagreement is 199

True solar time is the usual suspect in stories like this, so it is worth running. Reading sits at 75.93° west against a standard meridian of 75°, which pulls the clock back 3.7 minutes; the equation of time on 13 December adds about 5.1 minutes back. Net: roughly one minute forward. Applied to either record, the time barely moves and neither crosses a branch boundary because of it.

So the correction is not what separates the two readings, and it is not what would rescue either one. A reader who has been told that solar time is the thing that makes birth charts uncertain should notice this: here the astronomy is nearly silent, and all 199 minutes of uncertainty come from people, not from the Sun.

What the date fixes no matter which hour you use

Three pillars do not care about the argument. The year is 己巳. The month is 丙子 — 13 December falls after 大雪, so the month branch is 子, and the month stem follows from the year stem by the usual rule. The day is 丁未, with 丁 — Yin Fire — as the Day Master.

That means the parts of a reading that run off the month pillar are stable: the decade luck cycles are derived from the month pillar and the year stem, so they survive whichever hour you choose. So does the day master, and so does every relationship that only involves year, month and day.

What does not survive is anything that needs the hour — the hour pillar itself, the palace it fills, and any reading that weights the chart by strength, as the previous section shows.

Why the day pillar is not in question here

In Chinese reckoning the day changes at 23:00, not at midnight, which makes the 子 hour the only hour that straddles two calendar days. Any birth inside it can belong to either day depending on how the record was kept, and that is where most birth-time arguments actually bite.

Neither of the two times here is anywhere near it: 05:17 lands six hours and seventeen minutes after the previous 23:00, and 08:36 lands nine hours and thirty-six minutes after it. So the day pillar — 丁未 — is the same under both records, and the same if either record is off by an hour. That is a small mercy, and it is worth stating plainly, because it narrows the uncertainty to exactly one pillar instead of two.

Questions this page answers

**What is Taylor Swift's zodiac sign?** Sagittarius. The Sun was at 261.39° of ecliptic longitude at 05:17 and 261.53° at 08:36, both 21.4° inside the sign, with the next boundary eight and a half days away.

**What is her Chinese zodiac animal?** The Snake. 1989 is 己巳, and 13 December is more than six weeks from either year boundary, so the answer does not depend on which boundary system you use.

**Why will this page not give an hour pillar?** Because the two published records are 199 minutes apart and fall in different branches. Choosing one would mean inventing the part of the record that is missing, and then presenting the invention as the chart.

**Is her birth time unknown?** The date is not in dispute. The time is graded DD — conflicting and unverified — which is a statement about the evidence, not about her.