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The twelve sun signs, from Babylonian star lists through Ptolemy to the newspaper horoscope.

Western · sign 10 of 12 · natural 10th house

Capricorn

21 December – 20 January, 2025

2 claims about Capricorn can be traced to antiquity and are still made today. Everything else on this page arrived later, and each entry says when.

When Capricorn actually begins

ingress 202521 December 2025, 15:03 UTC
ends20 January 2026, 01:44 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202521 December – 22 December (35.0 h)

Computed from the Sun’s true ecliptic longitude for this year, not read from a fixed table. If you were born within a day of either boundary, a site using a table may put you in a different sign — and it is the table that is wrong.

What survives from antiquity

These are the only claims on this page that may honestly be introduced with “tradition holds”. Each is attested by an ancient or early-modern source and by a contemporary one.

What arrived with the popularisers

Claims that reach us through Alan Leo, Raphael and Sepharial — the Edwardian writers who turned astrology into a mass-market genre — with no ancient source behind them. These are usually the most familiar things said about Capricorn, and the page reference for each is below it.

What the tradition said and we stopped saying

Attested in antiquity, and repeated by no contemporary source in this corpus.

The fate the classical texts predicted

Firmicus Maternus and his contemporaries did not write character sketches. They predicted outcomes, and this is what they predicted for Capricorn. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • a short lifeJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.28.7
  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.15.3

The work

Occupations are the one part of this tradition that demonstrably reaches the present. Character claims mostly do not, and physiognomy does not at all — but the trades the classical texts assigned to Capricorn are still being assigned to it.

command and leadership — attested in antiquity and repeated today.

Rulership

The classical scheme gave every sign one of the seven visible planets. The outer planets were discovered between 1781 and 1930 and reassigned later, so where a sign has two rulers, both are real claims from different centuries. Neither is the correction of the other.

traditional

Saturn

attested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources

modern

none assigned

No outer planet was ever assigned to this sign. That is the answer, not a gap in the data.

Correspondences

Grouped by what kind of claim each is. Element and modality are agreed by every source in every century; the lucky numbers are agreed by almost nobody. Both appear on every astrology site in the same table, in the same type, which is how one borrows the other’s authority.

structural

Agreed by every source in every century.

element
  • earth
attested antiquity → present5 of 12 core sources
modality
  • cardinal
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • feminine
attested antiquity → present6 of 12 core sources
sect
  • nocturnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

classical

Classical taxonomy. Largely dropped by modern astrology.

direction
  • south
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

Classical doctrine. Stable, but the outer planets are a modern addition.

exaltation
  • Mars traditional
attested antiquity → present3 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Jupiter traditional
attested antiquity → present2 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Moon traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

mythic

The sign's image. Phrasings vary; the figure does not.

symbol
  • The Sea-Goat (goat-fish)
modern only · no pre-1929 source2 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Vesta
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

Melothesia — the sign's part of the body. Ancient, and not medical.

body part
  • Knees
  • knees
attested antiquity → present2 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

metal
  • Lead
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Saturday
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 13
  • 22
  • 4
  • 8
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
tarot card
  • The Devil (XV)
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

The body the old books describe

William Lilly, Raphael and Sepharial all told you what a Capricorn looked like. Modern astrology dropped this entirely: across the whole corpus, not one physical description is repeated by a contemporary source. It is reproduced here as what those writers said, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and for no other reason.

stature
short 3
build
lean 3ill-formed 2small 1strong 1
hair colour
dark 3
hair texture
coarse 1
hair volume
thin 3
face shape
long 3thin 2
brows
prominent 1
nose
long 2
chin
long 2narrow 2
neck
long 3thin 3
shoulders
sloping 1
chest
narrow 3
limbs
weak 2
gait
poor 1
features
prominent 1
previous Sagittariusopposite Cancernext Aquarius

Bodhastra documents what astrological traditions have said, and when they started saying it. It is presented as cultural history and entertainment. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or predictive advice, and nothing here is a claim about what will happen to you.

Every source, listed

Place data from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0.