To begin with, we can throw away everybody's favourite image of that eternal ashtray-emptier and furniture-duster.  The neat, orderly, tidy soul with the perfectly balanced bank account and the immaculate kitchen is a picture which sends most Virgos into fits of cynical laughter.  And even the virtuous, virginal lady with the unbound hair (discreetly clothed) who adorns jewelry and zodiacal knick-knacks doesn't have much to do with our theme either.  For some rather elusive reasons - reasons which just might lie, as so much astrological misunderstanding does, in the attempt during medieval times to Christianize or make 'moral' a symbolic system that is far older and more inclusive than Christianity - Virgo is sadly misinterpreted.  Some signs come out rather badly when you try to moralize symbols into social concepts, and Virgo and Scorpio have been hit the hardest - you're caught between the eternal secretary and the eternal sex maniac.  Well, like many Scorpios, Virgos are getting pretty resentful about all this misrepresentation.  Especially the untidy ones, who are quite shamelessly slovenly and not in the least concerned with whether they arrive at one minute before eight or one minute after.  It has been suggested that Virgos have not yet come into their own because the real ruler of Virgo - Vulcan - has not yet been discovered.  There has been, however, a discovery made of a strange little 'planet' between Saturn and Uranus, which astronomers were quick to call Chiron for reasons best known to themselves but which might just fill the bill.  We don't know yet.  Never mind.  What is Virgo really about, if not the eternal janitor of the zodiac? 

Let's bear in mind first of all that each sign has a deep, fundamental drive in it, a basic motivation which always spurs the individual whether he is aware of it or not.  This basic drive shows in different ways for different people.  We've already touched on these - how, for example, the drive toward understanding that motivates Sagittarius makes some Centaurs travelers and others scholars.  Physical or emotional or mental, the expression still comes from the same source.  And suffice it to say that Virgo's basic drive isn't toward cleanliness.  It has been suggested that perfectionism is a Virgo characteristic.  I haven't found this to be the case.  Discrimination, yes.  Absolutely.  No one is more discriminating than Virgo.  A simple yes or a simple no doesn't work; it's yes to this part and possibly to that part and probably no to the middle one unless A or B can be changed, and certainly no to the last.  Never black and white.  Black and white choices imply a simple universe, and to Virgo the universe is rarely simple.  It's more like a huge, boundless jigsaw puzzle, and it drives Virgo crazy if he hasn't got a picture of he puzzle on the top of the box before he begins to assemble the