Swimming with Sea Goats: Capricorn's Forgotten Living Stream
Solstitial ruminations and a poetic survey of the more watery myths that gather around Capricornus.
“Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?”
- Nick Land (Sun, Venus, and Mars in Capricorn)
“I see the moon, un-breathing,
a sky dead as canvas:
your world, strange and sickening,
I welcome, Emptiness!”
- Osip Mandlestam (Sun and Mercury in Capricorn)
“When I was a child, I spoke as a thrush, I
thought as a clod, I understood as a stone,
but when I became a man I put away
plain things for lustrous, yet to this day
squat under hooves for kindness where
fetlocks stream with mud – shall I never
get it clear, down in the soily waters.”
Denis Riley, from Say Something Back, Picador, 2016
On the other side of the solstice abyss, I’ve been pondering the mysteries of the sea goat — the sign where the light miraculously gathers again. When the contraction of winter slowly uncoils, like the spiraling pan horns themselves, sluicing spectral frequencies far beyond this realm. In fact, some medieval depictions of Capricorn render the sea goat in the shape of a shell — its form revealing the fibonacci sequence. The slow unspooling of eternity. This is Saturn’s feminine face after all, where earthen structures build themselves by curling, spiraling, and nesting.
As M and I walked the wastes of a frozen St Mary’s Lake on Christmas Day, I was struck by the paradoxical liveliness of “midwinter’s jangling tambourines of ice”, as put by Tomas Transtromer. The way the lake’s tympanic gong sharpened every sound. The revelation of a jingling bell on a dog’s collar — as if never heard before. Or the sinking of our boots through a layer of art deco-ed ice crystals: an alien static.
Capricorn is Saturn’s inward scrying form, where containment and stillness create a strange resonance. Solstice is the moment when our “ears stretch sensitive sails”, as put by Capricorn poet Osip Mandelstam. When we, ourselves, become as closed and reverberant as bells.
Despite its earthen trappings, Capricorn is a time-bender: helios arrives from the future. It’s a sign soaked in the mysteries of time, bridging the nostalgia of an antique Elysium with worlds that are still forming, whorling. Ruled by Saturn, the planet of thresholds, portals, and furthest frontiers, Capricorn guards the mysteries beyond the veil. For me, the Oracle of Delphi is an honorary sea goat, huffing gaseous fumes from her perch over that earthen chasm, her ecstatic glossolalia ordered into dactylic hexameter by attending scribes.
According to 2nd century Hellenistic astrologer, Vettius Valens, Capricorn is “lurking, two natured, moist, half-finished” — a sign associated with sculptors, farmers, toilers, and insomniacs. A sign not without mirth either, fond of cracking jokes even when they are most burdened.
Capricorn is between earth and water, bringing with it the pliancy of clay and ancient cuneiform tablets. Its crenelated tail plunges into the waters of the unconscious. Its nimble hooves dowse for subterranean springs. In the star catalogs of ancient Babylon, the constellation Capricornus was called Suhur Mas, translating as goat fish. This cluster of stars was associated with Enki, the Sumerian god of water, knowledge, mischief, crafts, and creation. In some depictions, he sports streaming epaulets, the Tigris flowing from one shoulder and the Euphrates from the other.
The rollers of a sea and storm-tossed dominate the Two of Pentacles, the card that rules the first decan of Capricorn. Despite the choppy water, a man juggles his two coins in the form of an infinity loop, embracing, rather than resisting, the living stream of life. Anything but a stick in the mud, the sea goat’s imaginative and intuitive faculties are subtle, free-flowing, and endlessly replenishing. Think David Bowie’s cross career shape-shifting between the Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, and Aladdin Sane.
In Hindu mythology, the Makara, a crocodile-like sea creature, is the equivalent to Capricorn. Considered guardians of gateways and thresholds, they protected the throne rooms of temples. Like the sea-goat, the Makara is also “two-natured and half-finished”, intermezzo, depicted as a half terrestrial and half aquatic animal. Its front legs are usually that of a stag, deer, or elephant, while its tail is that of a fish, seal, snake, or even a peacock.
It’s of Saturn’s nature to conserve but there’s nothing explicitly conservative about this sign. Capricorn, to me, is the exiled philosopher, the hedge witch, the hermit mystic, the haiku master Basho carving his poems into mossy stones. From Nostredamus to a Shanghai-exiled Nick Land, Capricorn is paradoxically “out of time”, often exalted posthumously. Though its more liminal and prophetic qualities have been lost in pop astrology, the ancients believed that prominent Capricorn placements were required in the honing of psychic abilities.
The master world-builder, J.R.R Tolkien was a Capricorn, weaving a lore so dense he actually created multiple languages related to Middle Earth, a practice he called glossopoeia. One of his first language projects was to reconstruct an early, unrecorded iteration of German that may have been spoken by the people of Beowulf. Edgar Allen Poe, regarded as the architect of the modern short story, was a Capricorn too. Though he’s best known for his macabre detective tales, Poe also wrote ethereal lyrics in a Pythian mood. In “Isfrael” he evokes angels and perhaps the keening of the spheres themselves:
“And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli’s fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings—
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.”
In one Greek myth, the Capricorn constellation was identified with Almathea, the she-goat that suckled Zeus in a mountain cave in Crete. Rhea rescued him from being swallowed by his patricide-paranoid father, Kronus, leaving a stone in Zeus’ place (a strange echo of the coal Santa leaves in stockings, perhaps). While sheltering with Almathea, the infant Zeus broke her horn in a fit of rough-housing, though he later transformed it into a cornucopia, or “horn of plenty”, as a gesture of thanks. The cornucopia is further symbolic of the Sun taking nourishment in the constellation before beginning its long ascent out of winter’s darkest hour.
In Norse mythology, the heidrun is a nanny goat that munches the leaves of the Læraðr, the Tree of Life, transforming it into precious mead. In one of my favorite scenes from Meet Me in St. Louis, a Saturnian film indeed, the grandfather waltzes his grand daughter behind a fir tree, where the switch happens: the generational passing over. She re-emerges in the arms of the young beau she thought had jilted her.
All of this complicates the idea that Capricorn is barren, cold, and miserly. Rather, the sea-goat brings sustenance, nourishment, miraculous gifts, and hope in our darkest hours. One of my favorite moments in The Chronicles of Narnia sees Father Christmas bestowing gifts to the child heroes in their moment of greatest need, when Narnia is still in the grips of an endless, enchanted winter. Lucy receives a healing cordial and a dagger, Peter a sword and shield, and Susan a bow with arrows, as well as a magical horn. As a child, I coveted these objects with an ache behind my breast-bone I can still feel.
Another myth associated with the constellation Capricornus nods to the star-faring “goat-fish” more explicitly. In Hyginus’ Poetic Astronomy, the Satyr god Pan dives into the Nile waters to escape the sea monster Typhon. The parts of his body above the water remain goat-like, while his legs transform into the tail of a fish: frozen between flight and flight.
During the First Century AD, the Roman Philosopher, Pliny the Elder, theorized that every land animal had its murky oceanic counterpart, which is why we have sea lions and seahorses (sea cucumbers were once called sea pigs). A dark and kelp-strewn unconscious is held at a distance, like a scrying mirror. Perhaps the fish-tail actually functions as a calligraphy stylus, where Saturnian lead transforms into grackled ink. If Pisces actually swims the oceans of our cosmic soup, absolutely merging with source, Capricorn remains at the threshold. I like to think of those horns as chthonic antennae, tumbling the slurry of springs and rivers into poetry, philosophy, and fantastical worlds.
Perhaps Capricorn’s providence over the void, the emptiness, the darkest depths of winter, provides a paradoxically fertile (and necessary) dialectical space. The two Saturn-ruled signs, Capricorn and Aquarius, stand opposite to Cancer and Leo — the signs ruled by our glitzy cosmic luminaries, the Moon and the Sun (the opposition itself is Saturn’s aspect). The true spirit of light is all the more palpable during December’s solar scarcity. And I find that as I get older, the solstice turning only feels more poignant — miraculous. When the poet writes of a moonless night, the reader brushes against a luminosity that’s even more profound; the space where the Moon could be vibrating with a darkness that’s alive.
In an interview for The Paris Review, Anne Carson speaks of emptiness and the god that lives in poetic enjambment (we do well to remember that Mars, the planet of severing, is exalted in the sign of Capricorn):
“Reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone Weil, I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t.
…this is the magic of fragments—the way that poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is the space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.”
In the winter of his artistic production, Henri Matisse, a Capricorn, embraced the “cut out” — what he called “drawing with scissors”. Physically enfeebled by old age and an intestinal disease, confined to his bed and a wheelchair, Saturn’s hard limits inspired some of his most vibrant and ethereal works. Clowns, acrobats and animals intermingle with war’s star-bursts and falling bodies. In the later years of his life, his apartment walls in Vence and Nice swam with mermaids, parakeets, fruit, and vegetal motifs, which he described as “a little garden all around me I can walk” — even in his last bedridden days.
Capricorn dwells, cheerfully, in this space of negation and paradoxically infinite possibility, where winter’s meager rations of light only sharpens the imaginative faculties. Capricorn is the claggy furrow that allows for the inrush of imaginal irrigation. Aquarius, the water-bearer, actually pours the visionary waters-electric but Capricorn’s role is no less crucial. This wintry sign is the well, the ditch, the hoof print filling with soily water. Nasa’s data sonification technology recently revealed an eerie keening pouring from the super massive black hole in the Perseus cluster. Capricorn is the abyss — singing.
Thank you for reading. IO Saturnalia! May your hope burnish itself as the days grow brighter, gold leaf by leaf. xoxo
Btw, here’s the link to my thicc solstice playlist. I hope you enjoy.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . .
The fat, bulbous, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males?
What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, while Globohomo diversity brigades go door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before . . .
With the borders of Europe and the USA wide open, civil warfare within the USA, Britain, and most of Europe is a certainty if foreign wars are initiated. Nobody is going to fight a war for Biden, he is dumber than Bush . . . Nobody is going to fight a war for that kikesucking Zionist ass-whore Nikki Haley, and I mean nobody.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution
Beautiful writing. I've been taken to the edge and am peering over.