Capricorn: the goat with a fish's tail

The German name is misleading. It points first of all to a real animal: a mountain dweller with heavy, ridged horns, standing on rock faces where nothing else stands. The zodiac sign means something else. On old star charts, on seals and in calendar pictures, Capricorn has a goat in front and a fish behind. The Sun runs through this sign for about four weeks from the winter solstice and leaves it around 20 January.

An animal that does not exist

The trail leads a long way back. In Mesopotamia the goat-fish creature has been attested for thousands of years; there it belonged to Ea, the god of the fresh water that was imagined to lie under the earth. The Latin name of the figure, Capricornus, means nothing more than goat horn — the fish half is not in the name, but was always understood along with it.

The Greeks later told a story to go with it: the shepherd god Pan is said to have jumped into the Nile while fleeing a monster; what went under water became fish, what stayed above it stayed goat. Explanations of this kind usually come after the picture and not before it. What they mainly show is that the hybrid creature already struck the storytellers themselves as something that needed explaining.

Hard to find in the sky

Anyone looking for the figure in the night sky needs a dark evening and patience. The constellation lies between Sagittarius and Aquarius, it is large and faint, its brightest star is of the third magnitude, and the lines drawn between its stars make a flat triangle or a boat rather than an animal. It can be seen in late summer and in autumn, low in the south. During the weeks of the sign it stands close to the Sun and is therefore all but invisible.

A well-known sign, then, whose constellation hardly anyone has ever consciously looked at.

The goat: the part everyone describes

The upper half appears in every description: the climb, the sure footing, the patience at a steep place. A goat on a mountain moves neither fast nor straight; it looks for the foothold that will hold, and puts up with detours to get it. There is nothing to be said against this picture. It is only that it describes half the figure.

The fish tail: the part that is missing

The lower half is under water, and down there it is not seen. It stands for everything this sign does not put on show, because nothing can be achieved with it: the long thinking that serves no purpose, the attachment to things that have lasted, the homesickness for places one would no longer want to live in at all.

Anyone who has known a Capricorn for some time has seen it. Someone everyone takes for level-headed is attached to an old house, to a tune, to a friendship from school days, and attached beyond all measure. The figure says that this is no contradiction but the second half of the same animal. It also says where the second half sits: below the waterline, out of sight, and no smaller for that.

What the picture is good for when reading

A sign is not a grade for character, and an old picture is no proof. As a corrective it works all the same. If you read a Capricorn description in which there is only climbing and holding out, half of it is missing. And if you are one yourself and recognise yourself in the usual texts, but always with the feeling that the warmer part does not appear: it really does not appear, and it has not appeared in almost any such list for centuries.

One question gets further here than any list of traits, and you can put it to every Capricorn you know: what do you do when there is nothing to be achieved just now? The answer belongs to the lower half, and no short portrait says a word about that.

Anyone who wants to describe a Capricorn does not get by with the goat alone. The second half has belonged to the figure for as long as the figure has existed; it was lost only in the lists. You will find the pictures of the remaining signs under zodiac signs, and the celestial bodies of a birth chart under planets.