The Full Moon in Cancer, exact this morning, reflects the umbral rays of a steadfast Sun in Capricorn.  The solstice came and went, moments of peak darkness inviting the slow return of light to days in the Northern Hemisphere.  Luna now moves into a conjunction with an exalted Jupiter as its company, and with day giving way to evening on the East Coast, together they emerge from under the horizon.  The gregorian new year’s cold ground is made momentarily fertile, filled with the big planet’s spiritual and material blessings, philosophical verve and inspired action finding ease of manifestation.

Sol’s climb through the cardinal earth of Capricorn, nocturnal home of Saturn, is well underway with Venus and Mars’ passing through the Sun’s rays on January 6th and 9th upcoming, then ending their respective cycles in catalytic rebirth conjunct our star.  This reflective and tender if not reactionary Moon is blessed by the bigness of Jupiter, yet with the fortunate planet always risking the excessive license it takes for itself.  Their swelling chord together holds more harmony than when Luna stared down Mars earlier today, soon after flitting away from complete eye-lock with Venus and the Sun.

Capricorn is the sinking down into materiality where light is ensouled, crystallized in various forms and functions, from leaden to lush, skeletal to sacramental.  It is Earth’s celebrated and desecrated planes of existence, that both tempt and enrich with ephemeral pursuits and becomings — yet provide the only firm and fleeting context we have for perceiving any transcendent Logos or intimations of ‘the beyond.’

The entanglement of spirit and matter inherent in the archetypal complex of Capricorn bears a more sensitized gravity when the Full Moon in Cancer mirrors it… Capricorn, a sign ruled by Saturn-as-Kronos, yet holding so many days which themselves can feel outside of time.

It is the first decan of Capricorn, called “Change” in Crowley’s ‘Book of Thoth’, that astrologer Austin Coppock in his seminal work ’36 Faces’ calls “A Headless Body.”  These images are immediately referential to absence of light, metaphoric to the agency of the spirit as it navigates the trenches of existence.  Coppock writes, “This level of identification with gross matter shocks the perception, and more subtle levels can easily be forgotten in the process.  The head is forgotten as consciousness descends.”  The face turned away, surveying its rulership, at wisest aware of the implicit crisis between oneself and the object of one’s perception.

One might picture ‘The Queen of Disks’, significator of Capricorn in the Thoth Tarot, her face turned away as she surveys the land — and further, one might give weighty inquiry as to what historic blood is in its soil.  While this image can at first evoke a cool disposition in wielding material power, the scope of one’s reach around a physical domain of possible control, it does well to be considered in relation to the sign’s commencement at the Sun’s point of least light.  The second decan of Capricorn, across which Venus, the Sun and Mars all lay, is a face skilled in strategy and foresight.  

On an individual level, this full moon lends a sensitivity to nuance, as well as deeper histories of past trauma and generational pain to be effectively harnessed in doing right by the present.  The Moon in its home of Cancer, with Jupiter in its exaltation the same, lends fortune where matters of reflection and outward manifestation are concerned — a more than supportive boon for personal momentum going into a new calendar year.  This is a feeling that is likely to build with Mars cazimi on January 9th.

On a collective level, one might look at world events in context of how all planets in Capricorn right now answer to Saturn in the last decan of Pisces, one which Coppock called “A Cup of Blood.”

The furthest of the seven traditional planets still visible to the naked eye, Saturn, implies the aforementioned ‘beyond’ as much as it does everything we can witness up to its boundary — the seeming schism between spirit and the matter ensouling it, a pressure to integrate.  Therein lie the paradoxes decorating much of Saturn’s mysticism, among them a simultaneous intuition and negation of the thing ‘yet to be made known.’

Saturn and Capricorn are ‘the whittling away’ at the sculpture of one’s life, amidst its affirmations and discard piles; the art of ‘saying no’ that informs the Work; the structures inhibiting passages of light, such that one might even see an old building’s walls and windows oriented around solstitial points in these fleeting gateway moments.

Saturn and Capricorn are the inference from what isn’t said; the proximity of riches in Titan’s oil; the droning sounds of the leaden planet’s plasma waves crashing onto moon Enceladus, as captured by Cassini.  Where Saturn’s nocturnal home of Capricorn opposes the Moon’s home of Cancer, its diurnal home of Aquarius opposes the Sun’s home of Leo.  Saturn — androgynous matriarch of the solar system, elder statesman surveying the liminal and superliminal.

In Pisces, where the time-binding planet has lingered since September when its retrograde took us back to these waters once more, we’ve been asked to find footholds in the shoreline, mapping the mirrored wingspans of joy and grief alike, still taunted by an elusive ocean floor before Saturn reenters Aries on February 13th.

If you tune out, stop the doomscroll, set the glowing conflict microchip down for a moment, it all seems to go away… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.  Sure, someone sitting under a waterfall -somewhere- humming an ‘om’ pitch hasn’t heard of Palantir or Project 2025, but the stories we’re being sold are still co-opting the next person, making waves in the landscape of human reaction and inter-psyche polarization.

Just as the post-pandemic world felt a far cry from 2019, this certainly isn’t the same world we were living in a year ago; few would argue that.  In all the swirling circuitry and spin artistry turned increasing cold, it would help to remember part of what the Cancer / Capricorn is about: rooting down in worlds both inner and outer, essential to the health of one’s own creative, familial, and intergenerational planetary ecosystems.

As always, swim well stargazers…


—A.B.