♑ Capricorn

Capricorn is the mountain of the zodiac: disciplined, ambitious and built for the long climb. It masters things slowly and carries real weight.

Capricorn at a glance

• DatesDecember 22 – January 19
• ElementEarth
• ModalityCardinal
• Ruling planetSaturn
• PolarityNegative
• ArchetypeThe Master / The Elder

Capricorn dates, to the minute

The Sun is in Capricorn from about 22 December to 19 January. The exact moment moves by up to a day from one year to the next, because a year is not a whole number of days. These are the moments the Sun crosses into Capricorn and out again, computed by the same engine that casts every chart on this site.

Times are Universal Time (UTC). Your own clock can put the change on the day before or the day after. Born on one of these days? The Sun sign then depends on the minute, and a chart cast with your birth time settles it.

What Capricorn is like

Capricorn begins on the shortest day, and the whole sign follows from that. It starts in the dark, on the understanding that the light comes back if you wait properly.

It plans in decades. A Capricorn ambition is usually quiet, and what makes it formidable is that it is still being worked on in year seven, long after the people who announced theirs have moved on to announcing something else.

Responsibility tends to arrive early here, often before it was fair. A great many Capricorns were the competent one in a house that needed a competent one, and the seriousness is less a temperament than a habit that was required.

Cardinal earth. It builds, and it builds things meant to outlast the builder.

In the body, Capricorn is linked to the knees, bones and skin.

What it costs

The load does not come off by itself. Capricorn will carry a thing simply because it is able to, and can go years without asking whether it was ever theirs to hold.

And achievement is a line that moves. The summit turns out to have been a shoulder, and a sign that plans in decades can arrive at fifty having met every target it set and still be waiting for permission to enjoy it.

Worth saying plainly: the world runs on people built like this. The question worth asking is whose standard you are measuring against, if it is anyone's but your own, and whether you would still ask them.

Your Sun sign is one placement of ten

A Sun sign is one planet out of ten, and this one says nothing about what you feel while you do it.

Every other body in the chart has a sign of its own, the Moon included. A Capricorn Sun with a Pisces Moon runs the whole thing and feels every bit of it. A chart describes the equipment. It is not a report on what got built.

Born with the Sun in Capricorn

Twelve of the most looked-up people among the famous charts on this site, each with the Sun in Capricorn at any hour of their birthday:

Each one is a full chart, with the Moon and every planet, so you can see how differently the same Sun sign sits in twelve lives.

Where Capricorn sits in your chart, whatever your sign

Every chart is divided twelve ways, so Capricorn has one of your houses even if there is no earth anywhere else in it.

Traditionally it is read as the long climb with no view from the bottom. Find yours, and notice where you are prepared to be slower than anyone would ask you to be.

Capricorn on the eastern horizon at the minute you were born makes a Capricorn rising sign, a different placement from a Capricorn Sun and one that needs your birth time: what a rising sign is.

Capricorn season, in the sky

Capricorn begins at the December solstice: the Sun's lowest point, the longest night in the northern hemisphere. It is the shortest day of the year and it is also the first day on which the days begin getting longer, which is the entire sign in one fact.

The creature it is named for is a sea-goat, half goat and half fish, and its constellation is among the faintest on the ecliptic. Not one bright star. The brightest it has, Deneb Algedi, the goat's tail, now falls at 23 degrees of the sign Aquarius.

Saturn, the sign's ruler

Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, which takes about twenty-nine and a half years to go round. That is where the Saturn return comes from: the planet arriving back where it started, at around twenty-nine and again at about fifty-eight.

Saturn's sign and house are where a chart meets resistance, and where it eventually becomes competent, in that order and never the other way about.

Capricorn compatibility

Capricorn with Aries · Taurus · Gemini · Cancer · Leo · Virgo · Libra · Scorpio · Sagittarius · Capricorn · Aquarius · Pisces.

A pairing of Sun signs is the coarsest version of compatibility. Two whole charts compared planet by planet is where the detail is.

Capricorn also touches

career, authority, structure, tradition, time, mastery, reputation, the long game.

A question to sit with

Whose standard are you measuring against, and would you still ask them?