Capricorn 13° (January 3)

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 Apparently even J.D. Salinger is yet to have another peak in his career own posthumous career as his stash of unpublished rolls out into the public light this year.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 It right, 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.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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