Pisces 8° (February 27)

 

Paris, Day Thirty Five of Sixty. And Day Seven of Bikram. It seems someone from Hachette might be interested in the book and I passed my signature along to Laurence who is hopefully settingling this long suffering suit; and we gave our two cents on the TV negotiations. Yoga class today in French was fine. S. went to get some lunchy things—ham sandwiches and quiche and salad—and then we had a meeting with Cricket who then set off for Dries. We need to fix a budget for that work, which I have tried to assert but to no great avail. We will walk quite quickly to our last class at the Alliance Francaise which is a bit sad really. Some of the students seemed a bit broken up about it. After we walk to Café de la Nouvelle Mairie. We both have the endive, pear and Roquefort salad and I have Coq and Stella has Lieu. And then we share un far de pruneaux for dessert. We are not walking home that is for sure. So we order another car. She is going to Switzerland in the morning and I’m a bit edgy as a result.

CAPRICORN Woman

As the sole cardinal-earth sign, symbolized by a mountain, Capricorn is as initiative, directive and pioneering as the other cardinal signs of Aries, Cancer and Libra. But, being in the element of earth, we aren’t subject to any fiery aggression of Aries or emotional urging of Cancer or ideological instigation of Libra. Rather, Capricorns scale, or move, mountains, slowly, quietly, over Time, with little regard for notice, let alone, notoriety. Capricorn woman is her own authority, looking to herself, and her own growth and achievement. On the shadow side, if she’s not tending to her own success and fulfillment, she will embody melancholy, elevating it to monumental status. A daughter of Saturn, old father Time, she isn’t lamenting but she does draw on the past, the golden days of yore, whether her personal own or universal ones. She thus projects a timeless, classic quality—not one prone to trends or obvious taste or behavior. She is an elegant creature disposed of an unapologetically self-contained character. You go to the mountain—she doesn’t come to you. Thus Capricorn has gained the reputation of being haughty, high and mighty; which is rarely the case. She merely personifies an ascended state of being that isn’t subject to scrutiny or censure, especially not by any patriarchy. She inhabits a private and rarified emotional retreat that serves her need for self-preservation; and while other signs might find her modus operandi too lonely-making to adopt themselves, she cultivates an enduring quality of self-reliance that trumps any need for outside validation or even support. Like a creature in hibernation, a nod to this winter sign, she conserves her energy for both the time and the travel ahead. She knows where she’s going, but is in no rush to get there. Her pace may be off-putting to others, but she is as sure-footed in her ascent as her symbol goat, a sea-goat actually, with a long fishy tail, symbolizing the store of emotional insight and intuition she carries with her and continually draws upon in her singular life journey, which she can be reluctant to share with, not to burden, others. Ah, those iconic Capricorns: Janis Joplin, Susan Sontag, Ruth Wilson, Diane Keaton, Dolly Parton, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Carla Bruni, Helena Christensen, Sade, Joanna Newsom, Marianne Faithfull, Mary J. Blige, Patti Smith, Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, Marlene Dietrich, Stella Starsky (born the same day as Dietrich, no big stretch there), Ethel Merman, Imelda Staunton, Gypsy Rose Lee, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Shirley Bassey, Nigella Lawson, Zooey Deschanel, Tippi Hendren, Dina Merrill, Holland Taylor, Sienna Miller, Mary Tyler Moore, Betty White, Maureen Dowd, Simone de Beauvoir, Ava Gardner, Sissy Spacek, Susan Lucci, Katey Segal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eartha Kitt, Tracy Ullman, Nichelle Nichols, Anna May Wong, Betsy Ross. Nichelle Nichols.

It’s from the grand mother goddess Rhea Cronus that we derive the word crone, the wise woman, the goddess in her wizened third aspect. Rhea is the Titan mother of the Olympian gods who saved her son Zeus from being gobbled to death by her husband, Cronus (Saturn), taking goat form as Amalthea to feed him from her horns o’ plenty. She also bequeathed her estate of orgiastic rites, leopards and wild retinue to her grandson Dionysus, Zeus’s heir apparent. The noisy cymbals are named for her as she is also called Cybele. She is the archetype of preservation, the personification of Capricorn’s cardinal-earth energy, emblemized by the aforementioned mountain—indeed, Rhea is the mountain mother who made her home on Mt. Ida. Capricorn women—Parton, Spacek, Fanny Bullock Workman—do love their mountains. The zodiac’s Mrs. Beasley—gunnysacks and granny glasses not withstanding—the Goat woman rarely thinks of herself as TheSecond Sex, despite it being the ironic title of Capricorn Simone DeBeauvoir’s tract. She naturally wears what might be traditionally considered men’s clothing. Enter Annie Lennox, Marlene Dietrich, Paula Poundstone, Patti Smith, Diane Keaton, Susan Sontag and even Mary Tyler Moore who fought a network to be able to sport her aptly named Capri (Goat) pants.

Capricorn woman makes no apologies for herself, neither explaining nor complaining. She is endurance incarnate who achieves over time. But she’s no mere climber—she personifies the astrological super power of ascension, for she is not a subscriber to struggle. She rises to the top of her achievements—the crème de la crème—via an outsized faith in her inner resource and the slow, steady outlasting of others who, by comparison, seem like flashes in the pan. They do, as the above list of Capricorn icons suggests, boast career longevity and often have their greatest successes later in life.

CAPRICORN Man

Just don’t call it a comeback: In many ways the trajectory of the Capricorn man can be a cautionary tale. Unlike his slow and steady sister, he tends to peak early then backslide, a literal dissident, falling from favor, only to climb his way back into public awareness or celebrity. The Capricorn totem is only half goat, remember. The Sea Goat boasts a fish tail which makes sustaining a climb rather tricky. Like the goat god, Pan, the original mood-swinger who would frolic wildly, then turn on a dime, running and wailing for cover and comfort, Capricorn man can get caught up in a frenzy of worldly status, delights, certain hedonism and over-exposure, resulting in an often visible personal fall. He’s complicated. The word tragedy actually means: goat song. Goat deities were culture gods who brought sophistication and certain decadence into the world—historically, we know these dynamics go hand in hand: Culture actually enriches during the downfall of a society. The Sea Goat is the very image of a being emerging from the primordial soup, like an actual culture growing from the germy world of a petri dish, even the most advanced forms of life having originated from the slime. And so you can never really keep a good Capricorn man down. He’s complex. He always seems to grow back even stronger and more enriched by his personal downfalls or minor tragedies into the most enduring and thoroughly more seasoned a character. Though we’ve yet to see the return of a Mel Gibson or, even, a Nicholas Cage, we would happily embrace and applaud the reconstituted, self-redemptive Capricorns likes of Jude Law, LL Cool Jay, Anthony Hopkins, Jared Leto, Bradley Cooper, Ralph Fiennes, Ricky Martin, Jason Bateman, Jon Voight, Patrick Dempsey, Rod Stewart, Ted Danson, James Earl Jones, Muhammad Ali (G.O.A.T. i.e. greatest of all time), Jared Leto, Danny McBride, Dax Shepard, Tommy Morrison, Robert Duvall, Frank Langella, Shawn Hatosy, David Caruso, Julian Sands, Oliver Platt, Desi Arnaz, Jr., Dave Grohl, Howard Stern. Apparently even J.D. Salinger is yet to have another peak in his career own posthumous career as his stash of unpublished rolls out into the public light this year.

The Capricorn male Goat is the male archetype of the winter season (surely, the new-born babe in Christian lore wasn’t a Capricorn but a Pisces as would befit a Jesus Fish): Capricorn is ruled by Saturn (Greek:Cronus), named for the old Titan king of the gods, since retired. He carries a sickle, prototype of Old Father Time, who, with and his sister-wife Rhea, ruled the Golden Age, when peace and harmony prevailed and nobody had to work to eat as the earth provided in abundance and when people lived to be hundreds of years old with a youthful countenance, dying peacefully in their sleep. Ah, the good old days. Saturn’s namesake Satyrs are, of course, goats, saturnine (gloomy) and saturnian (excessively lustful) which does speak volumes on the Capricorn man’s character. In the Canaanite mythos, Baal is the goat-god prototype of Moses, that mountain climbing geezer whom god commanded to build a tabernacle out of goat hair. Now there’s an idea. Capricorn: tenth sign. Moses: ten commandments—rules to live by—the Capri-corn is the goat horn of plenty signifying the cosmic energy of containment, preservation, resource, restriction, structure and stricture. Moses isn’t hippy dippy like Jesus. Moses has conditions. He is the grand-father authority. The original middleman. Church and religiosity as opposed to direct spiritual connection. Structure and discipline make Capricorn men sticklers for all things comme il faut.  They feel a responsibility to hold the (goat-hair) fabric of life together. Tradition! And it explains the need to impose rules in a world where, one skeptically suspects, few folks are moral. Capricorn men do Itright, which is adorable when applied to social etiquette—how to serve a cocktail, what weight cloth to wear in what season, or on which pinky to place a signet ring. They can be flawless in worldly doings. But, on the shadow side, practicing what they preach proves difficult; and just as their aesthetic includes a golden-age decay their desires can be likewise decadent. Only half cloven with a fish tail, the sea goat loses footing and backslides, dissident,  toppling from Sinai or Olympus, allowing themselves to be scapegoated for a multitude of sins. In effect, Capricorn are at once the most exalted and most human of all beings. And while they may not be perfect, they can be the hottest, most interesting, grandest daddies of them all: Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, David Bowie, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Denzel Washington, Ryan Seacrest, Kit Harrington,  Michael Stipe, Steven Soderbergh and arguable fall guys Jim Carrey, Andy Kaufman, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Tiger Woods, Phil Spector, Gerard Depardieu, Jim Bakker, J.D. Salinger, Rush Limbaugh, Mel Gibson, J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Luther King, Jr.

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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