The Winter Solstice has arrived, moments of peak darkness inviting the slow return of light to days in the Northern Hemisphere.  The Sun’s passage through cardinal earth sign Capricorn, the nocturnal home of Saturn, has commenced.

Capricorn is the sinking down into materiality where light is ensouled, crystallized in various forms and functions, from leaden to lush, skeletal to sacramental.  It is Earth’s celebrated and desecrated planes of existence, that both tempt and enrich with ephemeral pursuits and becomings — yet provide the only firm and fleeting context we have for perceiving any transcendent Logos or intimations of ‘the beyond.’

“Oh… I’m just visiting.” —David Bowie

The entanglement of spirit and matter bears an especially ‘gravitational’ feel this time of year; Capricorn a sign ruled by Saturn-as-Kronos, yet holding so many days which themselves feel outside of time.  One might picture ‘The Queen of Disks’ — significator of Capricorn in the Thoth Tarot — her face turned away as she surveys the land.  While this image can at first evoke a cool disposition in wielding material power, the scope of one’s reach around a physical domain of possible control, it does well to be considered in relation to the sign’s commencement at the Sun’s point of least light.

It is the first decan of Capricorn, called “Change” in Crowley’s ‘Book of Thoth’, that astrologer Austin Coppock in his seminal work ’36 Faces’ calls “A Headless Body.”  These images are immediately referential to absence of light, metaphoric to the agency of the spirit as it navigates the trenches of existence.  Austin writes, “This level of identification with gross matter shocks the perception, and more subtle levels can easily be forgotten in the process.  The head is forgotten as consciousness descends.”  The face turned away, surveying its rulership, at wisest aware of the implicit crisis between oneself and the object of one’s perception.

The furthest of the seven traditional planets still visible to the naked eye, Saturn, implies the aforementioned ‘beyond’ as much as it does everything we can witness up to its boundary — the seeming schism between spirit and the matter ensouling it, a pressure to integrate.  Therein lie the paradoxes decorating much of Saturn’s mysticism, the simultaneous intuition and negation.

Saturn and Capricorn are ‘the whittling away’ at the sculpture of one’s life, amidst its affirmations and discard piles; the art of ‘saying no’ that informs the Work; the structures inhibiting passages of light, such that one might even see an old building’s walls and windows oriented around solstitial points in these fleeting gateway moments.

Saturn and Capricorn are the inference from what isn’t said; the proximity of riches in Titan’s oil; the droning sounds of the leaden planet’s plasma waves crashing onto moon Enceladus, as captured by Cassini.  Where Saturn’s nocturnal home of Capricorn opposes the Moon’s home of Cancer, its diurnal home of Aquarius opposes the Sun’s home of Leo.  Saturn — they are androgynous matriarch of the solar system, elder statesman surveying the liminal and superliminal.

Saturn has been in its wall-rattling diurnal home of Aquarius for a year uninterrupted now, the winds of revolution blowing about, uniting and dividing as they please; a Tower of Babel beckoning integration.  The shift from a 200-year era of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in earth signs to a 200-year era of such in air signs, commenced with the gatekeeper planets’ conjunction in the early degrees of Aquarius on December 21st, 2020.

Already we’ve begun to see the compounding relevance of airy themes in human discourse as compared and contrasted with the earthy in the past couple centuries of post-Industrial Revolution materialistic… enormous shifts in monetary power based on speculation, e.g. cryptocurrency; airborne viruses rather than weapons of mass destruction; a scrambling of tongues via algorithm rather than veiled oil wars as center stage sociopolitical leverage points.

One of the many manifestations of the present Venus-Pluto conjunction in Capricorn, in context of an Aquarian , is the disturbing appropriation and digital property theft in artists having their work flagged off of social media platforms after being stolen and turned into NFT’s by bots.  Venus is high art, but also the coining of currency.  The number of frictional, pivotal, orgasmic, exhausting, enriching and bleak transits overhead holds so many swirling elements in its archetypal bouquet, it’s quite something to divine into.

If you tune out, stop the doomscroll, set the glowing conflict microchip down for a moment, it all seems to go away… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.  Sure, someone sitting under a waterfall -somewhere- humming an ‘om’ pitch hasn’t heard of Omicron, but the stories we’re being sold are still co-opting the next person, making waves in the landscape of human reaction and inter-psyche polarization.

As I mentioned a couple writings ago, these next few months of Venus’ jaunt through the underworld will see two additional conjunctions to Pluto in Capricorn, serving to clarify the pace of her exploration in the sign of the Sea-Goat.  All this as the third and final Saturn-Uranus square of 2021 prompts the ever present-question of where in our lives a grassroots-futurist revolution really has most been due.

This first decan of Capricorn that the Sun is presently transiting bears the rulership of Jupiter by way of the Chaldean Order.  During the Sun’s time in Capricorn decan I, we have Jupiter about to finish a year in Aquarius during which it was co-present with Saturn.  The movement of the ‘Greater Benefic’ into its nocturnal home of Pisces on December 28th should prove in some way shape or form to be a boon for the next year, and yet with America’s Pluto Return imminent, one can’t help but wonder.  

This is certainly not the same world we were living in two years ago, few would argue that.  But in some ways this doesn’t even seem to be much like the world we were living in six months ago.  In all the swirling circuitry and spin artistry turned increasing cold, it would help to remember part of what the Sun’s entrance into Capricorn is about: rooting down, with choice of location, both inner and outer, essential to the health of one’s own creative, familial, and intergenerational planetary ecosystems.  Swim well, stargazers~


—A.B.

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