esoteric rulership series: capricorn
a monastic look at the complex depth of saturn, its elements and behaviors, and the possible other depictions of capricorn throughout history.
the esoteric rulership for capricorn is not so complex as many other signs, but still requires bending of the information most of us have been spoon fed through our astro journeys – a favorite activity of mine, anyway. all of the zodiac signs have wildly different rulers than we would expect in traditional or modern astrology – all but two, that is. capricorn is one of the signs that doesn’t change, in that saturn is its ruler regardless of the system, but I still think there is an expansion to be had in understanding capricorn, looking at the same rulership from a different angle. I talk about it often enough, but I believe we are looking at the wrong expression of saturn and therefore capricorn, more often than not, and this limitation really stuffs one of our natural planetary authorities into a distorted, strangled box. in most pop astrology, saturn is the great achiever, the CEO, the boundary mage, and the goal-driven rule follower; but we don’t allow for the nuance that saturn, and therefore capricorn, can be so much more. to me, saturn is far beyond a capitalist’s sacrificial scapegoat – in fact, in my practice, she’s the portrait of high femme.
through saturn, we get to know an archetype that is all at once maternal and incredibly solitary. saturn is supportive Miss Honey in her whimsical house, and rigid Miss Trunchbull, and also Matilda, floating cereal bowls off the countertop. she’s Grandmother Willow, a museum curator, and a divine Parent figure. saturn is gender-transcendent Daddy, gentle enough to inflict lessons and constructive consequence, but still dark and mysterious enough that one of the additional exoteric rulers of capricorn is also considered to be Lilith. through saturn, we get to know a spectrum of shadowy mysticism that attunes to the cycle of life, liberation, and storytelling – to rise, to solidify, to crumble and rebuild anew in carefully employed and personally trustworthy structures and seasons. we get to know a planetary body that is lighter in weight than the makeup of water, and who has more moons (and sometimes, lunar baggage) than any other planet in our solar system. the most memorable planet for most of us, and yet the last in our visible succession. saturn is a planet surrounded by a protective, perilous ring of ice and rock, who spins herself flat from moving so quickly, a planet where a day is 10 hours but a year is 29 earth years. there is an emotional and liberating component to saturn, and still yet capricorn, that can be deeply uncovered by simply pivoting understanding – something that esotericism provides a wealth of movement within.
capricorn is a sign I’ve felt drawn to like a moth to a flame. me and cap, we do have the earth sign compatibility thing going on, but capricorn is also my 4th house and IC ruler. capricorn and saturnian energy really do feel like home to me: I thrive in routine, boundary, nostalgia, vintage interiors, validated success, and romantic melancholia. I also do see the traditional saturnian impetus in my child self. I was gifted and talented in school, took care of other family members at a young age, matured really quickly, and loved my personal space. I even wrote my AP artist’s statement in high school on the connection of destruction as a form of creation - a uniquely saturnian concept (and semi-plutonian, pluto was in capricorn ok). as I’ve gotten older, saturnian influence has helped challenge me to grow into a stronger-rooted version of myself, as it does. however, even through all the trials and tests of saturn, and even being in my return currently, I don’t think she’s all rules and regulations. I also don’t think that saturn often gets enough credit for the flexibility it can provide with strength and solidness of ground. a tree can bend against the wind at a whim if need be as long as its roots are firm in the earth. many plants can continue to regenerate and thrive as long as the roots are unimpacted, even if the rest of it dies. buildings can outlast earthquakes if their foundations are solid. the depth that this sign and its ruler encourage and provide for access cannot be overlooked. even for as high as the goat may climb, it is not winged. building on sagittarius’ poise and precision to create fiery movement and far outreach, capricorn holds responsibility for focus on what is precious and points humanity forward toward it: that which must be stewarded and archived in order to hold both the past and the future in equivalent awe, so what moves forward can never forget where it came from. ancestral traditions can last centuries if someone keeps tending and reviving them, and saturn holds the key to the continuation and cessation of evolutionary lineage, all of the mysterious intricate workings that help things begin, continue, and end.
the tenth sign’s symbol is the sea goat, a mythical creature all its own, but esoterically, it’s also associated with the unicorn and the crocodile. I touched upon the unicorn briefly during the full moon in capricorn HYPERLINK in the summer of 2024, but it bears revisiting in the goat’s season. the goat aspect of capricorn often focuses on mountain goats - the ones that scale the sides of cliffs for salt and other minerals to supplement their diets, and who live at alpine heights with certain cloven feet to take them where many others don’t have the ability or permission to go. the “sea” aspect of the goat is often said to come from Aegipan, a creature born from Pan, the horned forest god, when he jumped into the Nile river to escape the monstress Typhon, and attempted to turn himself into a fish, though only half of it took. Although, there’s some debate as to whether the constellation itself is after Amalthea, the woman who raised Zeus as an infant, either as a humanoid goat or on “goat mountain.” I like the latter because it feels more mysterious (and also seamlessly ties in the unicorn element with Princess Amalthea of The Last Unicorn) but in both stories, we see an esoteric transformation of capricorn’s potential: a focus on preservation, strengthening, and maturation, along with an undeniable nourishment through watery and feminine rearing.
much of capricorn’s relationship to the mystical and evasive unicorn comes from a gift of foresight and intuitive extension. modern unicorns are often horse-bodied animals, but the original unicorns were thought to look a lot more like goats. they were often white in color, with long, twisting horns extending from the forehead, right about where the pineal gland exists. unicorns were said to be notoriously hard to spot and even harder to capture, but it was believed that their body and blood carried powers of healing, purification, and protection (how very Christ-conscious). some lore says that only a virgin can capture or tame a unicorn, and that putting a virgin in the path of a unicorn would draw it, while it’s also said that drinking from a unicorn’s disembodied horn would protect the holder from poison. their horns were likened to cornucopia, or “horns of plenty,” blessing the receiver with gifts far and wide. the horn itself, expressing the evolution from sagittarius’ arrow, signifies a straight-shot pointedness toward what is known, trusted, and provided within capricorn’s gifts. the unicorn moves intentionally toward the point of fruition, coming from the pineal wisdom of what it knows, and aware that it does not need to rush or fly as long as it knows where to tread. that wisdom encompasses knowledge of personal limitation, careful hardening, and informed footing – cap knows that saturn doesn’t bless just anyone blindly, and faith is learned through hard-earned effort. through the unicorn, we also see a transcendence above binary or duality, as one horn takes the place of two. the horn represents an aligned, natural path, one of holistic and cyclical nature, opposing the paired, curved horns of the bull or ram that initiate the zodiac, as we get away from the humanistic need to balance various components. by overcoming humanistic dualism, we evolve and grow into a person with real bones, thoughts, struggles, and desires all existing as one, knowing that from dust we come and shall return again. through capricorn, we can expand the approach to saturn or the earth as a singular component and look at the ways it intertwines with the spectrum of elemental roles and rulership in a divine tapestry.
capricorn’s watery nature is yet another thing about the sign that cannot be overlooked (as it is literally half of its makeup), and yet so often, we do overlook it. water is heralded as the giver of life, the connector of all feeling and empathy, and the veil of the spiritual realm. cap knows that the majority of the mountains and rock formations that we regard in reverence would not exist without water having molded them or sheltered them for eons, and that all life exists along waterways for a structural reason. all earthly life evolved from the aquatic world, and it was the solvent catalyst needed for molecular evolution itself - something saturn will not, can not, minimize. much the same, the heights we reach cannot exist without a lubricant of personal security, emotional stability, a birthing avenue, and liquified resolve. but water giveth and it taketh away, in true cleansing fashion. interestingly enough, the Egyptians seemed to know this, to hone in on the waters of life – more direct an imposition, I think, when your whole civilization literally revolves around mostly one body of water and its actions. the constellation we now know as Capricornus was associated with the crocodile for them, which was believed to be an animal that exemplified and connected the energies of water, air, and earth. according to H.P. Blavatsky, the crocodile was a symbol of fertility and knowledge, and his deity depiction became known as Sobek, often depicted as a mirror in lieu of his anthropomorphic form. the concept of reflection as a capricorn idea ties together the waters of purity and life, the earth of grounded support, and the air of the sky above, all mirroring each other. the mirror’s reflection itself represented the serenity of the Nile and Sobek’s protective and life-giving properties, while also bringing forward the idea of self-reflection as a means to create unity, or to reveal or hide the truth. from here, we can relate this concept to the wealth of introspective understanding capricorn brings to the table, and reflects out into the world beyond. the earthiness of capricorn becomes its stability, and the water becomes its glamoured shield – both adding up to a unified concept of the sea goat’s field of access, and its ability to elude too much attention. moves in silence are cap’s specialty.
like any other cardinal sign, capricorn offers an initiation. cardinal signs, the beginners of the natural seasons, all have something they like to lead. the invitation here isn’t quite as obvious as aries’ fight, cancer’s feeling, or libra’s flirtation, especially if we bend the confines of capricorn as we know it. yes, it can be an initiation into goals and futuristic possibilities, but more than that, I believe capricorn (and saturn) initiates us most into what lies waiting within. it’s an acknowledgment of resources, but also of values, assets, and quality over quantity. regarding values, it’s not taurus’ appraising assessment or scorpio’s shadow dancing, it’s something more honest and gritty. it’s a pure, impartial look at what exists, what does not, and what, possibly, was never meant to. it stoically honors the evolution of what was not built to sustain and had to die, while also calling into question what is useful and stabilizing vs. what collects dust, and why, in order to bring esoteric ideas into material form. sometimes there is what is meant to be collected, to gain value, like an ancestral gift or artifact, sometimes the collection looks like the Museum of Natural History. sometimes the collection ends up like my childhood Barbies, sitting in their original boxes in storage, only appreciating dust and providing illusive memories… maybe, hopefully, increasing in monetary value over time, but telling a story of who I once was and what once existed nonetheless. it’s saturn’s job to assign usefulness and duty, and also to hold with care the important aspects of nostalgia and purpose as an expansive concept. capricorn challenges us to solidify and resolidify, a Marie-Kondo-ification to use all of our muscles to stabilize joints and structural capacity, assessing where application of new skill or old is required to meet a new plane of consciousness. saturn is the process of fossilization, petrification, and decay, telling stories about what existed as life on earth, and what happened in its demise. saturn is sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic but also a fluid cellular wall. the mysterious inner workings of the soul and higher consciousness find physical, calcified form in capricorn, which knows that all that can be known is beyond what we can see, but there is so much more to what we see than what we know. and it all starts with a descent into what is, asking what was, and better yet, what could be, in measured precision.
the discipline required from a saturnian sign is what breathes qualification into this archetype’s natural form, something unique to capricorn and separately distinct in aquarius. though saturn strongly represents what is material and physical, she also represents the idea of mind over matter. she sees and honors the intricate cycles of life, death, incarnation, and reincarnation. saturn rears a structure forward as an offering, to reach its full potential, and then both narrates the story of its death and assesses the rubble for reuse. capricorn is forged through an everlasting cosmic jenga game of challenging structural integrity – no stranger to the pressure that forms a diamond. the result is a character who is, transcending just wisdom, distinctly ascetic and somewhat monastic, modest, and minimalist. from aries to virgo, the signs seem to grasp new blocks and build on top of one another. alternatively, from virgo until we reach pisces, the signs go through a continuous gradual refinement, naturally selecting traits that work in the greater evolution through the zodiac’s chronological expression. capricorn’s selection is patience, careful attention, and a minimalist approach to its skillset – stripping the soul bare of all it’s gained through the celestial evolution thus far. saturn’s methods are tried and true, and I think this is where we get her sobriety from, dismissing that she is also gracious and persistent, acknowledging that all things have the permission to take their time. not every person or sign works well with rigidity or demand, so it’s lucky that that’s not saturn’s total MO. we can all gain things from reliability, simplicity, and careful repetition, and truthfully, it’s harsh only to those of us with no ability to see the big picture. saturn is buoyant, it has a gift for being able to tread and displace the illusive watery surface that would draw so many of us deeper into its wells and wiles.
it’s seemingly paradoxical that saturn’s behavior is to simplify and systemize, and yet, capricorn is the furthest thing from simple. there are too many ways to roll in saturn’s garden and bury our hands in her soil, ways that naturally defy but still revere simplicity and smallness. in the way that a mountain is a simple concept, but standing near it is awesome and unbelievable, we find the magic of saturn. where we find the meeting point of recognizing our insignificance next to the stars, but our great significance next to a molecular structure or a cellular entity, we find the magic of saturn. we can swim the deepest waters and climb the highest peaks and still not know all of the mysteries capricorn has access to, but we can play with it naked as we came, with pure trust and reliance on our internal tools and touchpoints. as capricorn guides us through the armored wisdom of the crocodile, the sharp intuitive purity of the unicorn, and the evolutionary wonder of the sea goat, we can play with different expressions of elemental significance and ascension. capricorn is a journey, not a destination, as proven by its esoteric wisdom.