Sun in Capricorn - The Winter Solstice & the Treadmill Resolution

A Christmas Carol Ghost of Christmas Present

On the 21st December, 2012 the Sun traveller moves country, as it does every month.  This time it takes a firm, determined step onto the foothills of Cardinal earth sign Capricorn's mountain ranges. It’s good to feel so secure and sure footed, to know our place and if we need to, stand our ground. Now we can get down to business and face up to some tough decisions. The roads in this land may look rocky, avalanche prone and have some very steep climbs ahead but we are more than up for the tasks required to navigate our way forward. Shoulders to the wheel then, sleeves rolled up because we actually want to set to work.

There is a shift to the more tangible now, a move towards what we own and aspire to attain. This is most welcome after the more abstract, idealistic, conceptual world of the Sun traveller's environment of last month. Here though, we will also encounter the gritty reality of facing life without being able to take any easy short cuts. It’s the long and winding road and the hard way or the highway that beckons us. Any soft, easy option will not suit Capricorn once it takes on its task, or faces its responsibility and challenges. Those of you with your Sun sign in Capricorn know exactly the truth of this statement because these facts already plays a large part in your mythology. 

              
Scottish singer-songwriter, political activist and philanthropist Annie Lennox has her birthday on Christmas Day

As we all journey with the Sun, we all move into Capricorn with it’s determination and firmly set jaw. Goats, Capricorns own symbol, have a reputation for eating anything put in front of them and Sun Capricorn's will gladly munch into any task you set before them, no matter what or how long it takes. Capricorn Sun time takes place at Christmas and the Western New Year. Both dates when we all gladly devour whatever fruits and harvest from the earth are set before us. Grape, hop, potatoes, cranberries, the tables groans with all manner of earthly delights BUT also included in this time span are the renowned and well meant NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS! 
              
Actor Jim Carrey has a Capricorn Sun
Resolutions, at this time, can offer us a balance to excess, where targets are set and denial and self-discipline are also called upon. It may appear that all of a sudden our jolly, carefree, devil-take-the-hind-most attitude shifts to the serious, sober, repentant, devil-of-a-work-out. Devils of course are a classic Capricorn motif with links to sacrificial goats and taken directly from the pagan, Pan. In the Northern Hemisphere this time of year also includes the Winter Equinox, the longest night of the year. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere (you know who you are), it signals the longest day, when the results of all your hard work in the gym can be revealed on the beach or perhaps not quite yet!

Singer/songwriter of The Pogues Shane MacGowan was born on Christmas Day

So life is going take a distinctly different turn to the one we just passed through in the fire sign, Sagittarius. Gone is last month’s cavalier, spendthrift attitude, gone is the lightness and carefree spirit, au revoir the bon viveur, arrivederci let tomorrow take care of itself bravado, now is the time to do our sums and count the cost.
Now as pragmatism and ambitious targets dominate the landscape, we find the energy to begin to build our own personal empire and to practice what we have been preaching for the last month. We want our plans and dreams to be real, tangible, visible and obvious for all to admire. We are concerned with getting things right for ourselves as well as our loved ones. But here are a couple of Capricorn secrets 1) they desire everyone to live well and 2) they are quite a bit mystical and spiritual on the quiet and have a depth of mind which fearlessly needs answers. They just need proof that’s all. 
Ambitious, taciturn, dignified, authoritative, protective, responsible and reliable, welcome to the Capricorn landscape.These behaviour traits and issues will be all around us, whether we like it or not, we may ponder, not answer at first, deliberately evade or debate them, at some level we will meet them face to face. Capricorn so desperately wants answers, it needs to know so that it can feel safe. It would much rather climb the mountain it can see rather than waste time trying to discover the tiniest problem it can’t see but knows is there - somewhere. ‘Show me the full scale and scope of what I have to tackle and I will utterly do my best' says Capricorn. 

Singer Marianne Faithful has Sun in Capricorn

So what can we expect as Capricorn energy pours down to us through the Sun’s rays? After all we will be affected whether we are indoors, outdoors, sleeping or waking, we will be saturated in its devilish, mature, and determined power. We can expect to be more conscientious, much more vulnerable than we look, a little bit more ambitious and a lot more dutiful. We will be fully aware and awake to what is required of others and ourselves. We can boss, lead, manage and administer, in short we will probably take it all on our broad shoulders.The zone's presided over by Capricorn in our lives will start to undergo their annual kit inspection and drill. If you have planets ‘tuned in’ to receive Capricorn energy then they will feel the squeeze. If you are Venus in Capricorn the way you relate and how you receive love and money will get a boost. If you have Mars here, the way you marshal your troops to attack or defend will come to attention. You may well be called up to assert, defend or clarify your position, outline your targets and assert your authority. 

Sun in Capricorn time the end of December and the beginning of January is about fulfilling our duties towards others and defining our aims. Its about setting our sights high always higher than last year.

We may all find ourselves racing off with a new idea, scheme, situation, project, person or group, one way or another we are hungry for change. Whatever we do, however we behave, we will be sure to do it with our own style and at our own pace. Capricorn is our spine, it is what holds us up, its what helps us move our hips but it is not immediately visible especially when clothed with obvious exceptions. 

Singer/Actor 'The King' Elvis Presley has Sun in Capricorn

You won’t often hear ‘oh look at that lovely spine’ in public, well maybe you will at an osteopaths gathering which is where you may also find many a Capricorn. Capricorn is not always obvious, shouty, or clambering for attention but it's quiet authority is always there. Never underestimate the core of Capricorn. Homo sapiens walk upright and keep on evolving. We are not spineless. Capricorn is made of sterner stuff. The month of Capricorn is when we all may just prove it....so see you on the treadmill in the New Year.

Singer Rod Stewart 'Rod the Mod' has a Capricorn Sun

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year

credits:you tube

posted by pippa ponton & jphibbs

Venus in Sagittarius - Faith in the Future

Our hearfelt sympathy and support for the community of Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

From the 17th December, 2012 Venus sets off at a canter through the fire lands of Sagittarius to scour for new sources of stimulation and enchantment after her intense sojourn through the watery depths of Scorpio. She would normally spend her time having a laugh, enjoying the festivities and buoying up who ever she greets throughout the holiday season until the 9th of January, 2013 when she will have a much more serious attitude in earthy Capricorn. However, the Sandy Hook, Connecticut community has not been allowed this celebration, right now the community is suffering indescribable pain and insurmountable grief after losing 28 lives, including the perpetrator, to unspeakable, tragic violence visited on them on the 14th December, 2012. 20 of those killed by the 20 year old gunman Adam Lanza, a member of this community, in one of America's worst mass shootings, were the ages of 6 and 7, little girls and boys in two kindergarten classes in what was previously, the 'safest town in America'. 

Venus has been quite intense in Scorpio for the past month and we have had to adjust to this way of being. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary took place while Venus was in Scorpio and yet no discussion of astrology aspects right now seem entirely appropriate or will reverse the situation or indeed bring about the only miracle this Christmas the grieving families of Sandy Hook will want. 

The Sagittarian centaur will take us forward and all of us need to believe and have some faith in a better future. It is still party season for so many of us, where the clown of the zodiac, Sagittarius normally likes us all to shine. Don’t be fooled though this sign is also a deep thinker and is always thinking well ahead of the game. Hunting out the good and chasing after the truth gets Sagittarius gears moving forward and Sagittarius loves a good run out, only made better with an ideal to aim for. A Sagittarius Venus will generously take us all along for the ride to admire all the amazing views and sharing the experience. 

Guru Paramahansa Yogananda has Venus in Sagittarius introduced many westerners to yoga and meditation.

'Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself..'Bizarrely, Mother and 1st victim Nancy Lanza and Adam Lanza, lived on Yogananda Street, Newtown.

Nancy Lanza may have been a 'prepper' stockpiling food and guns she was preparing for the worst - 

TEOTWAWKI ('the end of the world as we know it') became a self fulling prophecy in this sad story.

Sagittarius will want us to apply our attention to the bigger picture and to what we know to be good and positive. With Venus the goddess of what we love here for a while, Sagittarius will urge us to reach out to the world, expand our perspective and if not actually be chasing a dream spending some time making a new one. It will want us to be brave and to explore what is important to us, what really matters, how we invest our time and what sort of future we want to put our faith in. Venus in Scorpio made sure we left no stone unturned in our surge for desire and to merge with those we love. She has been seductive and used highly persuasive methods to get what she wants. However, Sagittarius is now running the Venus ‘Love ‘n Money Show’ so if we need to dig out some heat-proof gloves because its 'showtime' and about to get hotter. Stop all that silent, mysterious sexy treatment, now is the time have it all open and out, fling the windows and doors wide and down the rabbit hole.

Writer Lewis Carroll has Venus in Sagittarius, best known for children's favorite Alice in Wonderland

We will all have this coming month where our relationships may get a bit more rowdy and bawdy. It will become that much more important to relate on an equal and honest basis. We may need to banish the darkness and demons by talking openly about them and then if all else fails metaphorically running after them with the Centaur's massive bow and arrow. Before we get too carried away with idealism, it may also be the case that we get much more tactless, insensitive and loud. It could all get a bit too much with just about everything, food, drink, revelry, honesty, blurting, buying, giving, singing, whatever. In keeping with the season, excess may end up being the name of the game or part of another adventure.

Writer Mark Twain has Venus in Sagittarius and wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
modelled on himself as a child

Venus likes to indulge anyway ( Venus Come Out Of Your Shell). Anointing the body, making it look, smell and feel really good is what she is about. Feeding the senses are another huge aspect of her delight as she adores beauty in all it's forms. Venus also has an innate appreciation of the finer things in life, art, culture and social interactions. Venus obviously desires relationships and everything concerned with them but she is surprisingly highly attuned to aspects of gaining, controlling and distributing money as well. Venus also view fairness with a sharp eye and puts it high on her list of needs. A run through our Venus list gives us an idea on just how fundamental and central Venus is to our lives. Love and Money is the name of her game and getting those two things sorted out will make most people feel that they have a good handle on life. Denying the need for money, the need for love or to deny the need for both is unusual.

Key to understanding what is going on for us is to look at where in ourselves we are ‘Sagittarius-attuned’. We all have degrees in our birth chart which looks out for any Sagittarius vibration, our personal Sagittarius antenna. It will be good to look at how smoothly the matters connected to our Sagittarius house and/or planets run and if they are functioning as well as they could an how we can set up improvements and find the real treasures.  

Writer robert Louis Stevenson has Venus in Sagittarius wrote the children adventure, Treasure Island

If you have Sagittarius spanning the 3rd house zone you may find your words have been falling like a hod of bricks or  in fact reaching a level of inspiration which may need to go global. All depends on what your goal may be, yet for this month it will be likely that your goal gets plural and becomes goals, or grows in size and becomes wide-sweeping, most probably both.

If your own Venus is in Sagittarius then you already keep the faith and now here it is your time so go for it. Welcome in new arrivals, people or money, this will be your time to have the ‘Wow factor’. 

If you are a Sun sign Sagittarius then hey, this is easy for you. Well yes up to a point because even a ‘yeah give it to me straight’ Sagittarius has its limits, finally and being kind and generous is a biggie that needs re-fuelling sometimes. However, your hearts desire for emotional freedom and companionship will get an extra boost and this month may be just the time for you to find exactly what you want.

Writer Khalil Gibran has Venus in Sagittarius wrote The Prophet
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Over Christmas and New Year we recognise 'tis the season to be jolly' and the avuncular Santa Claus is the embodiment of Jupiter, the ruling planet of Sagittarius. Santa travels the whole world in one night, after all, he is overtly generous and lets out an all resounding all pervasive call for laughter 'Ho Ho Ho'! Let us all keep faith in the future and hope we will all feel the impulse to be generous, kind and loving. Whatever we believe, whoever we believe in, it is finally about how we behave towards one another. It is our humanity and our compassion that makes us heroes and gives us enough faith in the future to send those arrows of hopes and dreams towards the stars.
                
Singer Neil Young with Mercury in Sagittarius (Mercury in Sagittarius - Postcards from an Optimistic Mind) the Sun makes up the Sagittarius trio of the moment (Sun in Sagittarius - Big Time Adventures on Horseback) 
credits: heavy.com & mark ovaska & lawrencedagstine 
posted by pippa ponton & jphibbs

New Moon in Sagittarius -Substance in the Shadows

Writer Victor Hugo has Moon in Sagittarius
One of his best know works is Hunchback of Notre Dame
'sacrificing the earth for paradise is giving up the substance for the shadow'

The Moon moves out of it’s dark Balsamic phase on the 13th December, 2012 and starts afresh in the sign of Sagittarius. In the week or so before this date we may have been just going with the flow, allowing things to drift along where they will and maybe we tried to let go of what needed to be released. We may have even said ‘goodbye’ to what we thought was lost or an enthusiastic 'hello' as it may well be rediscovered. There will have been a general air of waiting and a sense of resting a while. We may feel that there is something hidden but brewing, just out of our sight. Something is growing and building, a glimmer of a plan or a flicker of an idea may be gestating. We may not get to know exactly what it is, the time for revelation is a few weeks away yet but we are prompted and primed to prepare for a change of our own making.

Actress Emma Watson has a Sagittarius Moon
This glimmer of light, this sliver of a shift in awareness is this month’s New Moon occurring at 21 degrees of Sagittarius. This degree falls a couple of degrees shy of the star Lesath, or Aculeus, which can highlight outspokenness and ‘toughing it out’. Over this time it look as if we will be able to give as good as we get having to verbally defend our opinions, standpoint or beliefs and committing ourselves.

Depending on what is triggered in our chart by 21 degrees Sagittarius we could use a smooth and soothing tone and have a way with words to get our point across. Or we can even dream up fantastic new ideas relating to area of our chart being activated. Those born around the 12th/16th December of any year have their Sun always shining on this point and can relate really easily to the double action of having to tough it out and smooth over ruffled feathers, sometimes at the same time. Examples of this double handed juggling act include Gustave Flaubert, Jamie Foxx, Sanjay Gandhi, Dionne Warwick, Dilma Rousseff, Oscar Niemeyer (We Are Stardust Series 2 - Oscar Niemeyer Drawing Curves in the Sky).
                
Christopher Plummer has his Sun and Moon in Sagittarius. At the age of 82 he became the oldest actor to win an Academy Award in 2012 in the film Beginners for Best Supporting Actor.
We can all benefit from this easy way with words that may have to say difficult things. The smooth and palatable line can divert attention away from the tender difficult subject matter. We can accomplish much more this way, even if sometimes it still kicks up the dust and grit of opposition we will be more than equipped to finding a path through. At the very least we can raise a laugh even over the grumbling and shaking of fists.

While the Sun and the Moon have each other for company (Sun in Sagittarius - Big Time Adventures on Horseback), nurturing mutual benefit and understanding, they are still a bit ‘out there’ on their own. This ever expanding duo is pretty much left to their own devices as they form no other major ties to the rest of the planets at the moment. Now being left to get on and do its own thing, independent, free and untrammeled may sound like music to any Sagittarian ears and it may seem so on paper. Yet despite what Sagittarius says the sign actually thrives on contact with others, it is Mutable, it feeds off feedback, even if it 'knows'. 

Astrologer Liz Greene has Moon in Sagittarius
'Freedom is important to Sagittarius for ver special reasons....It is almost as if the heavens are strewn with magical glyphs, and life is like a treasure hunt. One tries to work out what a particular experience means, and what it is supposed to be teaching, and how one can grow from it. Once that experience has wrung dry, and then one finds the next clue in the next experience. Hopefully, one day it will all be revealed, which, of course, it never is. The design just gets larger and larger.' By Liz Greene, Barriers and Boundaries.

The New Moon in Sagittarius for us means that just as we first gallop off without bridle, girth or reins we may literally fell like cavorting (in keeping with the party season). We may all relish the feeling of freedom, shaking our heads with delight at the prospect of such uninterrupted and unmonitored time to just be ourselves. Oh the plans we may foresee, the truths we can try to hunt down, the new opinions we can try and and form and all those ideas blowing around like tumbleweed through our fertile imaginings. We may want to set our sights on huge vistas, panoramas of potentials, massive all encompassing projects, the list may seem joyfully endless. Then we may turn around to gush at those around us, to gleefully share what we see, only to discover that our audience have not followed our personal star at all but are in actual fact chasing their very own ones. We may just have to 'keep the faith', believe in ourselves and enjoy our own jokes, now that is something Sagittarius finds easy.

Actress Portia de Rossi has Moon in Sagittarius (with Ellen DeGeneres Mars in Sagittarius and Saturn in Sagittarius/both with Sagittarius Ascendents) 
Over the next few days of New Moon time will bring a rush of outward looking Sagittarian energy. We could stand out from the herd, reach higher ground and gain some perspective or just take an idea and soar on the thermals. Think about future projects, plans and schemes and try to envision how you want things to actually manifest. Sagittarius needs a firm footing with its four feet stable on the earth to shoot any arrows skyward. Don’t expect everyone to gather round and join in with you, they may well have their own stuff to get on with. The gathering could well come later in a few weeks time at the Full Moon. On the same day as the New Moon it so happens that Uranus, planet of bolts from the blue and illumination takes a move forward, thus ending its backward, Retrograde, motion, for the time being anyway. With Uranus in Aries surging onward again it rekindles our more revolutionary and exciting projects. We are thirsty for change, hungry for innovation and ready to make it happen. This all neatly fits in to the recent forward of Mercury (Mercury in Sagittarius - Postcards from an Optimistic Mind) and its re-arrival into the sign of the moment - Sagittarius and so excited and full of ideas right now.

New Moons want to ignite, they are there to start stuff off, they sew the seeds, often in unseen and invisible ways, after all the light from the Moon is still just a sliver and like an acorn it is hiding much more than it will have to show. New Moons are those times when there is often a spark of freshness even novelty as we start something again or begin brand new projects and undertakings. Our hope and optimism will surge and we feel a ‘well why not’ attitude welling up inside us and we may even notice it in other people. The few days around the New Moon is excellent for trying out new things, experimenting with new styles, trying new tastes or generating ideas. This is a time for experimentation and play. With the New Moon activating the fire sign of Sagittarius, much of this testing out could be motivational, inspirational, or philosophical it will also be very focussed on political matters.

We can use the energy in our favour by taking steps to learn something new or factor in a period of study. We would benefit from opening up our world and expanding our boundaries and find ourselves being quite daring. We may be a bit more loud and boisterous even letting our hair down more than occasionally. Share your jokes you never know someone may find them really funny or not but hey thats life.

Singer/Actor Ol' Blue Eyes, member of The Rat Pack Frank Sinatra had Sun & Moon in Sagittarius 

credits: wikepedia & kathy foote footeography & astrodienst
posted by pippa ponton & jphibbs