Capricorn: what is already fixed besides the Sun

Capricorn means, to begin with, only one thing: at your birth your Sun stood in this sign, that is, in the stretch of the zodiac it travels through in the depth of winter. That is a single piece of information from a birth chart, and most texts treat it as if that settled everything. Yet that one piece of information yields more than the portraits contain — and it does so by arithmetic alone. Two planets cannot be just anywhere in your chart.

Three signs are left for your Mercury

Mercury travels inside the Earth's orbit. Seen from the Earth it can therefore never move far from the Sun: its orbit allows no more than about 28 degrees. In the sky it can be seen only shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset; the rest of the time it disappears in the Sun's light.

For a birth chart this has a hard consequence. If your Sun is in Capricorn, three possibilities are left for your Mercury: Sagittarius, Capricorn or Aquarius. A Mercury in Taurus, in Libra or in Virgo is ruled out in your case, and nobody has to work anything out to know it.

Five are left for your Venus

Venus has more room, though not unlimited room: its greatest distance from the Sun is about 47 degrees. As a Capricorn you can therefore have it in Scorpio, in Sagittarius, in Capricorn, in Aquarius or in Pisces — five signs that all lie in the same corner of the circle. A Venus in Leo or in Virgo does not occur in your case.

All of this can be checked in the sky itself. Both appear only at twilight, Mercury briefly and barely above the horizon, Venus for a couple of hours and visible from far off. In the middle of the night neither of them is to be found, and the reason is the same one that leaves them only a few signs in your birth chart.

Why two Capricorns think differently

These three Mercury placements are no small matter, because Mercury describes how someone thinks, talks and works a matter out. Put three Capricorns on the same task: the first starts from the bigger picture, the second from the costs, the third from the point where, in their view, the matter does not add up. In the end all three may arrive at the same result; even so, none of them would recognise themselves in the description of the other two.

That is why a Capricorn description can feel foreign to you even when it is properly done. What is described there is the Sun. How you go about a matter depends, besides that, on a planet that in three Capricorns can sit in three different signs.

What remains entirely open

That is as far as the bare date of birth reaches. Everything beyond it is left open.

In a Capricorn the Moon can stand in any of the twelve signs; it changes sign every two days or so, and on some days it is the birth time that decides which one it is in. The ascendant depends on the minute in any case — in the course of a day it runs once through the whole circle, moving on one sign every two hours on average. And the slow planets depend on the year of birth: in two Capricorns born twelve years apart, Jupiter stands in almost the same place in the zodiac, while Saturn stands somewhere else entirely.

Your ruler's clock

Capricorn is assigned Saturn, the slowest of the classical planets: it needs about two and a half years for a single sign and just under thirty for the whole circle. Something very practical follows from that. A weekly text lives on what changes within seven days, that is, above all on the Moon, on Mercury, on Venus and on the Sun. With your ruler almost nothing changes in a week, and that is why it hardly appears there.

This is not a weakness of the sign but a difference of time scales: the week belongs to the fast placements, the years to the slow ones. Where your Mercury and your Venus actually stand, any calculation of your birth chart will show you in seconds. What a single celestial body means in the chart you can look up under planets; why the birth time decides the larger part, under the ascendant; the other eleven signs are set out under zodiac signs.