The Aries ingress: how the astrological year is judged
This is an earlier address of an article that now lives at the Aries ingress. The address is kept because it still receives links from elsewhere.
In short: the astrological year begins at the Sun's entry into Aries, not in January; the chart is cast for a particular place, so there is no single chart for the world; and it describes conditions rather than events, with the year's lunations and quarterly ingresses read against it.