CAPRICORN: The Next 2 Years

The outer planets are occupying the 1st three houses, or 1st quadrant, of your solar chart, so the overall emphasis here for the next 2 years is on self-development. As a Capricorn you are good at getting on in the world, at rising high in your profession, at earning the respect of others. Broadly speaking, it is time to stand back a bit from all that and examine your motives: to separate, for example, the genuine desire for excellence from compulsive ambition based on insecurity: “You can never have enough of what you don’t really need.”

Pluto is currently entering your solar 1st House. If you are the sort of Capricorn who is seamlessly and one-sidedly materialistic, then yes, Pluto may well raise you even higher in your profession and give you pots more money. But then you probably won’t be reading this blog. If you’ve also got something transformational going on in you, then Pluto will make it all go horribly wrong when you try to take the next step up the tree. Pluto gets a bad press, but his real nature is evolutionary, and he doesn’t mind the price tag. If he spots a fissure in you, he will exploit it, he will destroy your career if necessary – if you’re still not listening – to get you to look at what is real power, what are real riches.

Real power and wealth lies within. Pluto wants you to build a solid basis within yourself, where you know who you are and what are your values, and where you feel this deeply so that it cannot be shaken by the good or bad opinion of others (flattery can knock us off-centre just as much as destructive criticism can.) Pluto wants you to stare at that insecurity in yourself, that void, that fear that if you relax you will be found wanting. Because it’s not as bad as you think. Then you will have real power, and a sense of fulfilment from within.

As a Capricorn you will still be good at whatever you do, because you are talented and sure-footed, and you take the time to learn things thoroughly. In fact, you will become even better at what you do, because you will have more power, a stronger foundation within yourself. You may or may not continue to win the applause of the crowd. But that will no longer be the point. The point is that by facing your own insecurities, instead of compensating for them, you will experience that solid foundation and sense of authority that is your life goal as a Capricorn, and because it is within it can never be taken away, unlike the outer achievement.

This Pluto theme will continue for the next 15 years, and will be particularly intense when Pluto hits the relevant degree of Capricorn in your chart.

Neptune is in your 2nd House of money, values and talents. Neptune is not materialistic at all, and that is not to praise him, because the material realm is part of life. But he is getting you to look at your values, what you feel to be important: as a Capricorn, this will probably include wealth and status. Neptune doesn’t necessarily work like Pluto (though he can do). What you may have been noticing over the last 10 years (since Neptune entered your solar 2nd House) is that your compulsive ambition has been easing and dissolving, that the things you wanted so desperately to achieve when you were younger are not so important any more. This means you can’t achieve those things any more, in those circles you are now a loser!


Rip Van Winkle

But within yourself you are becoming more human, and it is like gradually waking up from a dream (Neptune). What were those youthful follies, how could those things have seemed so important to you?

As a Capricorn it is second-nature to fit in with convention, to dress like those around you, to hold the same sorts of opinions. It is not that you are consciously conforming: what is around you genuinely seems right and proper and sensible. But this is changing as Uranus passes through your 3rd House of rational thought. Uranus thinks originally, but not in the sense of being wilfully different. Originality happens when you look at things as if for the first time, without your own preconceptions and without fear of others thinking you strange. So Uranus has for some years been breaking up the easy lines of thought that you have been following, the unconsciously derivative views of the world that you have held.This is a bit threatening to a Capricorn – what would your boss think if he knew the strange way your mind works – but dammit, your career is falling apart anyway, so you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, or should I say goat?

Saturn, your ruling planet, is in your solar 9th. This is a house of philosophy, of religion, of whatever it is that takes us out of the humdrum and into questions of purpose and meaning. For a Capricorn, this is two-sided. For one sort of Capricorn, they need to get out of the everyday and the material, because that tends to define them and, successful as they might be, they also become very narrow and boring people. Saturn in the 9th is saying you are going to be feeling this narrowness unless you also have something bigger going on in your life, you will feel down and depressed unless you find a concrete activity that expresses some sort of wider purpose to your life. For another sort of Capricorn, let’s say the transformationally-oriented sort, Saturn in the 9th is helping them know the accumulated wisdom of their lifetime, the hard-won self-knowledge, and to communicate it to others, to teach it. For a Capricorn, this wisdom is essentially practical and down-to-earth. This is the Capricorn worldliness at its best: it knows that wisdom is not to be found somewhere else, like in a book, or from a priest. Everything there is to be known is in our ordinary daily lives if you look hard enough and for long enough and if you learn from your experience.