Mon 12 Dec.
With ten days to go left in Sagittarius season (give me a break), I am already yearning for the reliable and unrelenting whip of Capricorn. Merry Christmas!
Saturn in the first house is a stern placement. The first house in astrology represents a person’s identity: their physical appearance, their temperament. Saturn is the planet of discipline, patriarchy, and lessons learned the hard way.
I was in the seventh grade when I was introduced to astrology. I had just been moved from public elementary school to a private Catholic middle school in a super-wealthy part of San Diego. The girls were mean, and we hadn’t hit puberty yet, so I mostly befriended boys. One of them was a dorky Libra (I was to learn) with flashy blue eyes named Ben. Ben came over after school one time and we went on the computer (there was only one in the house in 2003) so he could show me astrology.
He entered my birth date, place, and time, and interpreted the strange circular chart that appeared. “Your rising sign,” I remember him saying, “is Capricorn. That’s the sign of hard work, ambition, and being boring.”
How like cardinal air to bully anything that moves – or rather, to try to bully what will not be moved (that is, cardinal earth). But it was okay because I was twelve, and I loved Ben, the way I loved anything that would share knowledge with me. I can’t remember what else he told me about my chart, but that Capricorn comment stuck with me. Being ruled by Saturn is no laughing matter.
I got deeper into astrology as the years went by. In high school, I only looked as far as sun signs and Venus placements, to understand agon among friend groups and to test compatibility with crushes. In college, I got into ascendants (rising signs), which allegedly would show you what you were destined to make of yourself in this lifetime, and I figured out my moon, the ruler of emotions, and that provided a lot of relief. When your sun sign does not reflect who you feel you truly are, as often it does not, the chart can foster deep impostor issues, self-doubt. Knowing my moon set me free to feel as a mutable feels and stop guilting myself as a fixed sun.
During the MFA and then my time in Vienna, I studied less strategically and more holistically, and learned about houses and aspects. I also opened up to the idea that since the earth moves through all twelve signs each year, and the moon changes signs every two and a half days, and all the other planets are likewise transiting on their own schedules, everyone is always being affected by every sign at some point or other, and one’s natal chart is just the beginning of a wide-lens understanding of self and relationship through the signs. Beatrex’s moon books were a revelation, as were sessions with Jill.
Each sign is ruled by a planet: Capricorn is ruled by Saturn. My rising sign is Capricorn, which gives me the somber brow that used to worry my teachers. I remember Joanna Picciotto keeping me back after class once to ask me what the matter was one day in Early Modern English. She erased the chalkboard and turned to inspect my face. I thought she was very beautiful in an alarming way – dark black hair and oversized hawkish green eyes, always in a wrap dress and boots. “Oh,” she said, “I get it now!” and pulled back from my face. “It’s in your eyebrows. You look sad when you’re thinking.”
This kind of comment was common—I sport the Saturnian brow. It is a classic anecdote for someone ruled by Capricorn. “What’s wrong?” “—Nothing; I am burdened by the world.” There’s something morbid to a Saturnian that does not take pleasure in the morbidity (like a water sign might). Pleasure and pain are conflated for the Saturnian; this is where ambition comes in. They are driven. It is (ostensibly) pleasurable to succeed, and to succeed presumes hard work, and hard work (it seems) requires pain. This predicts for workaholics who deny and avoid their emotions, as I have been for a good part of my life. But suffer and struggle as they must, they are also built to last.
image: Aubrey Beardsley, illustration of protectively Saturnian expression and posture; attendant darkness swirling around the head.