The Capricorn Ascendant

general summary for a Capricorn Ascendant (rising sign)

What the tradition reads

A Capricorn Ascendant is read through the same rule as any rising sign: it is the door a person is met through rather than the core underneath, the manner and often the bearing that strangers notice first. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and Wikipedia's account of the earth sign ascendants describes Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn risings alike as calm and stress resistant, more material, reserved and collected, people who do not tend to show their emotions and can be or appear cold, thrifty and good at planning things beforehand. Cafe Astrology's fuller reading of Capricorn rising in particular describes a seriousness that is unmistakable even when the person is joking, an image conscious wish to appear competent that mostly succeeds, and a habit, often adopted at a very young age, of becoming the structured, dependable, responsible member of the family, hard working and competent to others while privately still asking whether they are doing enough. Saturn as the sign's ruler carries unusual weight for this Ascendant: the planet ruling the ascendant's own sign is called the chart ruler and is said to carry particular importance for the whole chart, so its house and condition are read as the project this Capricorn rising is quietly organised around.

The story

Capricorn's own story is the story of the goat with the fish's tail. The Babylonians used the sign of the Goat Fish as a symbol of their god Ea, a figure already drawn on a cylinder seal from around the twenty first century BCE and recorded again in the Babylonian star catalogues before 1000 BCE. The Greeks kept the strange double body and gave it two competing tales, that it is Pan, who saved himself from the monster Typhon by giving himself a fish's tail and diving into a river, or that it is Amalthea, the goat that suckled the infant Zeus after his mother Rhea saved him from being devoured by his father Cronos, her broken horn transformed into the cornucopia, the horn of plenty. Either way the sign carries a double nature into its own story before any chart is drawn on it, at once a Babylonian god's own symbol and a figure of narrow escape or of a broken horn made bountiful, an old, patched together symbol for a sign the tradition already reads as guarded and composed on the surface.

Written from

Corpus key ascendant:Capricorn.