The Deeper Meaning of Mars in Capricorn

Hey everyone, this is Adam Elenbaas from nightlight astrology. Today, we're going to take a look at the deeper meaning of Mars's recent entrance into the sign of Capricorn. We've already taken a look at the Mars Jupiter trine that is starting to come through this week. But I thought it might be nice to pause and just take a deeper look at Mars in Capricorn and why it is considered to be exalted in that place.

In order to do so, I'm going to show you an episode from a series that I did a while back called Planets in Profile on Mars through all of the signs. So, if you haven't seen this series before, it's new content that you might want to check out because all of those episodes are evergreen. We just take Mercury, Mars, and Venus through all 12 signs. They're all there in a playlist in my library that you can look at and find those episodes that I did previously.

We're going to rewind one of those today and explore that as a way of unpacking Mars's re-entrance into the sign of Capricorn, and before we get into that, though, I'm going to show you also the timeline of Mars its entrance into Capricorn and, you know some of the important dates as we look at Mars journey through the sign of Capricorn, some of the things we'll be looking at in the coming weeks too.

Anyway, before we get into it, don't forget to like and subscribe, share your comments and reflections in the comment section, and if you'd like, you can find a transcript of my daily talks, including today's on the website nightlightastrology.com The only other announcement I have for you guys is our Master Class series on the fixed stars begins next week. It is not too late to sign up for that or to apply if you need tuition assistance; you can apply for that through the website nightlightastrology.com.

Go to the Courses page and click the Master Class series. The other thing to note is that today, we start our routes and spheres. Moon Circle, we meet for the first time this evening. So, if you'd like to join, it's not too late. If you need tuition assistance for that as well. On the website, go to the Roots and Spheres page under the courses, and feel free to sign up if you want to try to get in at the last minute. You can also just email us at info@nightlightastrology.com. We can get you signed up quickly that way, and then finally, my year three course begins on Friday of this week. That'll be tomorrow, and again, need-based tuition is there if you need it. So, all those questions can be addressed through the courses tabs on the website, and if you have questions again, feel free to email us info at nightlightastrology.com.

All right, well, today I'm looking at the astrology of Mars in Capricorn. We're going to do this Planets in Profile episode and reboot it. But you'll notice that Mars enters Capricorn right around January 4, and then if we take this forward, we'll notice that Mars goes all the way through Capricorn and moves pretty slowly, right compared to other planets. It's fast. It's slower than the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and the Sun, and it finally enters Aquarius right around February 13.

So we have this with us all the way through the middle of February now. Now, if we back this up and take a look at some of the things that are still to happen this month, one of the things that I think we can look forward to is obviously the Jupiter Mars trine. That's one of the major things that Mars is doing. We take this forward a little bit more beyond that; you're going to notice that Mercury and Mars get together in a conjunction in Capricorn, and let's see here what we'll use. There, they are coming together. That's about January 26. If we take this forward just a bit more, the two planets Mercury and Mars travel together for a couple of days, and then Mars, right around January 29, excuse me, Mars will trine Uranus, which is another major astrological configuration from Mars that we have to look forward to this month.

So a bunch of Mars energy exalted in Capricorn coming through, and then if you push it beyond, if you go beyond that, you'll notice that there is a meaningful sextile. So, pretty brief, that's around February 6, between Mars and Neptune, and then you'll see that Mars enters Aquarius and conjoins Pluto, which is a big deal about the middle of February, and we'll be turning the page on that next month.

So anyway, that's sort of the outline of what Mars is doing, some really big Mars transits. We looked at Mars Jupiter already, but today, just an exploration of Mars into Capricorn and also, hopefully, exposing some of you who are newer to the channel to that series that I did on planets called Planets in Profile, which I'm currently doing little by little on the Moon. But you can go back and watch for Mercury, Venus, or Mars, and here's an example of that. So I hope you'll enjoy it.

Today, we're going to look at Mars in its exultation in the sign of Capricorn. So I'm gonna go ahead and put a little presentation up on the screen so that you can see it, and let's go into full-screen mode here. All right, so Mars and Capricorn. Now, of all of the signs that Mars can occupy, this is one of the strongest placements for Mars; Mars naturally considered to be exalted in the sign, which means that its energy is very bright, very strong, very powerful, often associated with the more famous and sometimes ennobled Mars themes, but as we'll see in this presentation today, there's also actually some really interesting and diverse themes. You wouldn't necessarily guess when thinking about Mars and Capricorn due to a few stereotypes that tend to get in the way. So, hopefully, we'll talk about that as well.

Now, we have famously pictured here Walt Disney and the Walt Disney World Mickey Mouse because Walt Disney had Mars and Capricorn. We're gonna talk about that too. So, remember, the basic, the basic way of understanding any planet in any sign works like this. In ancient astrology, when a planet is in its own sign, it is in its own temple. So, the signs are thought of as the temples of the gods, the houses of the gods. That's where the original term house comes from. Cancer is the house of the Moon. Capricorn is the house of Saturn like that. It's not until much later that we have this separate concept called houses, like the house of your siblings or the house of home and family.

Originally, those were also called Top Boy places, and the signs were called the houses. Anyway, that's just an interesting aside. Now, when a planet is in a sign other than its own home sign and is thus a guest in somebody else's temple, and depending on whose temple it's in, the planet will express itself and its own natural significations through the lens of the planetary temple in which it resides.

So, when we talk about Mars and Capricorn, we are saying that Mars is a houseguest in the in the is a houseguest and Saturn's in Saturn's home. So, as every planet is placed into different environments, there are a series of qualifying labels that we give to the planets in the signs called Essential dignities, and when a planet again is in its own home sign, it sort of acts and behaves most like itself when it's in another planet.

So it has to make a kind of compromise between its nature and the nature of the planet that rules the sign it's in. Some places are really conducive to a planet being itself, doing its best version of itself, and some places are not. Capricorn, which is the cold, dry, tropical feminine earth sign of Saturn, is. This is the place where Mars is exalted because Mars, in this particular sign, has a really good relationship with Saturn.

So Mars is going to express itself, its own natural qualities, which we know to be action-cutting, severing, invasion, competition, courage, and bravery. Inceptions are starting things. Not a lot of people know that Mars was also originally associated with things like math and science because of the idea of the analytics of Mars and the cutting, dividing, and dissecting qualities of Mars. Anyway, Mars does incredibly well in this sign because it gets along with Saturn pretty well.

Now, what you get when you mix the two together is typically an incredibly hard, practical, effective, driven work ethic. You get people who are very strong, determined, focused, disciplined, mature, and serious but also action-oriented. You get a kind of rugged Mars, you get an earthy Mars, and interestingly, because not a lot of people know that. The Capricornian sign is also associated with the goat god Pan.

It's a very sexual sign that a lot of people know about Capricorn; a lot of people just think, oh, Saturn, all they're concerned with is, you know, like making money or, you know, enterprising and ambition and achievement. But it's a feminine sign. It's a very sensual sign. Don't forget the bottom of the sea goat is a fish, which connects us to the realm of the ocean, the realm of water, and the realm of desire, but also the feminine, earthy signs are all sensual signs. Even though sometimes we think of Earth as a little bit more dry, or cold, which is part of Saturn's sort of wintry nature.

It's the first sign of winter, Capricorn is, but Saturn was also traditionally associated with melancholy, and melancholy is associated with the imaginative temperament, moody, imaginative, dark, mysterious, and can be quite sexual in this regard as well.

So don't sleep on Capricorn when it comes to a pretty diverse range of significances. Now, when you put Mars in Capricorn, some of the blend of those sensual, mysterious, exotic, dark, edgy, gritty themes will come out in addition to your typical, high achieving, disciplined, focused, you know, practical Mars Saturn are sort of earthy significations. It's important to note that Mars in Saturn sign is going to be expressing itself through the lens of Saturn. This also means that the negative Saturn side, negative Saturnine qualities, can come out in Mars's journey through Capricorn.

So, for example, you can be a little ruthless, cold, detached, and, you know, sort of focused so intently on achieving something that one won't, you know, it doesn't matter who loses or who gets hurt in the process. So, just that kind of ruthlessness. It can also be the case that Mars in Capricorn can be someone who is possessed by work, someone who is, you know, almost like workaholism, and it can also be that someone is possessed by a kind of dark angsty broody melancholy that they express in really reckless ways because Mars is like the rebel or the punk or, you know, the angry one and Saturn can be, you know, especially Capricorn can be kind of dark and Pan-like, and that can be a little like a little bit like the devil card in the tarot.

So, anyway, there's a wide range of people who are really interesting, really interesting expressions of Mars and Capricorn, and it's not like one consistent theme that you'll see with people who were born with Mars in Capricorn. The other thing to remember is that Capricorn was called the gateway of the gods, whereas its opposite sign, Cancer, was called the gateway of man, and the basic reason for this is that Cancer is a place where life is thought to originate the soul descending into matter, and the soul coming into Spirit coming into incarnation. Capricorn is the place of death, the beginning of the winter solstice where the body the individuals leaving the body, and so the Saturn Mars combination of rulerships in Capricorn, the domicile rulership being Saturn, the exultation, ruler being Mars, signify the detachment necessary for example, to leave the body for the sake of spiritual life.

For example, you have pictures of, you know, yogis sort of blasting out the crown chakra of their head, and it takes incredible focus and austerity; they're like Olympians of spiritual life in some ways. So you do have this kind of really intense sense of, you know, using one's will to transcend. Saturn is not often thought of as a planet that's related to transcendence, but it is; it always was prior to Neptune's existence. Saturn really carries so many of the Neptunian significations in ancient astrology.

Everything from melancholy to winter to mystery to Saturn being the gateway between the physical and the spiritual. It's the last of the visible planets; I always say this dumbest, most distant planet sits on the threshold between what we can see and what we can't see, and the Capricornian gateway is as Saturn is associated with impermanence, death, and what lies beyond this mortal veil. So Mars in Capricorn also has this kind of transcendent quality to it, which is a little dark and otherworldly and associated with death, but also the kind of Steely tenacity that's required to, you know, be a stoic or a yogi or someone who sees beyond the shadows of this world. So, it can be very otherworldly Mars.

Anyway, we're gonna see that as we give you some examples. So, let's just talk about a variety of people; I'm going to group some of these people together, like Marlon Brando, Brad Pitt, and Robert Pattinson. They are each of them gritty sort of hardcore Mars-like characters. We have several of them playing vampires. Right? Remember the Twilight series and Interview with a Vampire and stuff like that? Marlon Brando, of course, all of them play this kind of edgy, moody, angsty, but very masculine figures. They have a slight, almost like sensitivity and angst Enos that lends it; it's more sensual. It's, but it's mysterious and dark, and that's the kind of masculine quality that you'll see in some of the actors that have Mars and Capricorn.

On the other hand, you have just straight-up hardcore rockers who have a really dark but sort of poetic edge to them, like Ozzy Osbourne or Patti Smith. I know that they're not at all comparable in some ways; they're very different people and musicians, and so forth. But Patti Smith is sort of a punk poet. I was reading that somewhere. She was described as the poet laureate of punk music. So she's sort of intellectual, dark, feminist punk, you know, rock icon Ozzy Osbourne is more straight-up, you know, bats and blood. Do you know what I mean? But he's also quite poetic. You know, there's a lot of the songs that were quite poetic, and like that, of course, you have typical, like, very high accomplishing athletes.

I haven't mentioned here Steph Curry for Golden State Warriors, one of the greatest, you know, arguably the greatest three-point shooter of all time in basketball, Neymar, Rafael Nadal, Usain Bolt. There's a lot more, but there's a very high achieving sort of phenom who is also known for being really regimented and disciplined with the way that they practice and so forth. So I think that that's also really interesting. You have people who are, you have a couple of scientists who are studying the structures of reality, the strict, you know, the, we're studying biology, and it's not like a lot of the times, you know, Mars is gonna show up really prominently in scientists charts, because again, Mars and Mercury together were rulers over things like math and science in ancient astrology, because of the analytical intellect. So, Einstein and Louis Pasteur, I hope I said his name correctly. Both, you know, really, of course, really, really credible scientists.

Then you have this other category of, I want to say that these are like dark, edgy musicians, but they're also very mysterious, sensual, very Pan-like, remember the goat God and really otherworldly, and that's the Saturn aspect. We don't always again; we just forget that Saturn was traditionally related to melancholy mystery, moodiness, broodiness, darkness, and imaginativeness, and so you have people like Bjork, Lady Gaga, and David Bowie.

So you have Bjork and, and, and the likes of Bjork who are going to make, you know, just this kind of almost like sci-fi pagan, you know, pagan poetry. Have you ever heard that? I think it's an album or song by her. You also have just kind of your almost like, I want to say, like glam, glam artist, women who have like a really muscular, powerful edge to them like Katy Katy Perry, Shakira, Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani. Other artists like Frida Kahlo. So, you know, you have this really, it's just, it's just interesting how sensual and erotic and dark Capricorn can be, and when you put Mars in there in a woman's chart, you see the same kind of thing that you see with like Marlon Brando, Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, all actors, but you see it playing out in these very, you know, for example, someone who had a lot of Capricorn energy was JRR Tolkien.

So, you know, Saturn's energy is really good for fantasy. Because it is a planet that looks distantly at the world with grief or disappointment and imagines something else and imagine the last time the last era Atlantis, I mean, this is, this is what Saturn is, like, we forget the colorful stripes. It's colorful and mysterious stripes and rings around Saturn, it's important to think of that in your mind so that you don't just go into some ironically deadened version of Saturn, which would only really represents one of the dark elements of Saturn that's, you know, sort of like it's ignorant or it's overly structured or strict and like yes, but it's also a lot of other things.

Then you have, like, your really sort of Rough Riders, almost like ultra hyper-masculine, like Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders or John Wayne or Ronald Reagan, where there's this sort of like, I don't know, it almost like, you know, Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt, of course, you both you have both images of kind of like cowboys, or like, kind of classical images of masculine earthy toughness or whatever, even if it's just a projected image, you get the idea. Whereas, of course, John Wayne is an actor, but so was Ronald Reagan. That's an interesting point. Did they, and they both, you know, started westerns, I believe, too?

I mean, I know John Wayne did, and I think Ronald Reagan did as well. You have like Samuel L. Jackson, the tough bad guy. I really love him. How he plays such a badass, you know? That's so Mars and Capricorn. He's just sort of tough and ruthless and ice cold, and he plays characters like that, and you also have this really interesting theme that will oftentimes have something to do with being, like, organized like figures who are very martial in that they want to. There's there's force, there's muscle, their strength behind their personality and their life path. But they are very disciplined, and they make, you know, they're not it's not an unbridled Mars, in other words, and they often have a message of social change that they want to carry forward like Michael Moore, for example.

Rosa Parks, right? So in both cases, you have this idea of the kind of militant resistance and clashes with authority that can be really, really strong because you have Mars got a will and force in a sign Saturn that has a lot to do with the status quo, tradition and authority and it's not uncommon to see people with Mars and Capricorn, either really, you know, like a steam engine going toward traditional worldly authority, rank mastery and achievement or being someone who wants to challenge the status quo, which is a Mars Capricorn kind of dynamic or Mars Saturn dynamic. So, Michael Moore and Rosa Parks are examples like that.

Of course, you also have people who are just really deep and intense intellectuals like Soren Kierkegaard, where you have Aleister Crowley, or who was my other one? Edgar Casey, all I know is they're very different. But they all have, like Soren Kierkegaard, of course, is a just sort of brilliant, sort of Christian existentialist if such a thing, if you can imagine such a thing. So he's just just very brilliant. But, he blends some of the elements of existentialism with the walk of faith, and it has a kind of dark, mysterious Capricornian feeling to it, and it's very forceful. I mean, when you read his books, it's really, it's really strong, and it's confrontational and confronts something in the soul.

That was my experience of reading him. I did a senior paper on him in my undergrad in philosophy. Then, if you think about it, there's just like captains of industry who go after, like, traditional worldly success, and they're, you know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Or if you think about Walt Disney, again, someone who just built an empire, what's really interesting about Walt Disney is he built this empire, but it's total imagination, you know, and that's, again, such a Capricornian thing.

I'll say it again, and I promise I'll shut up soon. Then, you know, everyone typically comes up with stereotypes about Capricorn just being sort of worldly, standard traditional achievement, and the thing is, Capricorn also has a very otherworldly quality to it. It's very imaginative, and it gets very frustrated with the mundane world.

Saturn is not so much about the mundane world as it is the boundaries that maintain or keep the status quo, what Laos lies on the other side, and the complex relationship between the two. Saturn straddles that boundary and implies the relationship between what's on both sides of the boundary. That's why again, Saturn rules opposition's, so Walt Disney captain of industry, was very successful in traditional sort of American capitalist ways, but Disney world which is this place, it's built on fairy tales. So this should give you some idea. Let's see if I missed any on my list. I think I got most of them. Oh, Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey. That's interesting.

Francis Ford Coppola is interesting to Francis Ford Coppola, of course, known for, you know, the Godfather movies in particular, which are really, really dark and have to do with the mafia and so forth. So there's that, you know, and not just, I'm trying to remember some of the other ones that Francis Ford Coppola has done. And, of course, I'm just going to forget right at the important moment.

Anyway, tell me what other movies Francis Ford Coppola has done in the chat section. I'd love to hear from you guys that embody that theme of the the warrior but kind of kind of dark, right? Like the godfather. It's organized crime. It has that structured, traditional hierarchical feeling, but it's also ruthless and cold. You know, a lot of cold killers in The Godfather series, of course.

This is also really interesting because Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey, of course, are like mirror images of each other in terms of, you know, at least one phase in their careers. Jim Carrey was compared to Jerry Lewis all the time and said that Jerry Lewis was like an icon of his. Again, one of the things that's really impressive is they're both of their abilities. Both of them are like contortionists of their face, their body language, and oftentimes you see this incredible degree of control with the, of the body and have almost like a kind of controlled athleticism that you'll see with people like, you know, well, I go back to the list, but Steph Curry again comes to mind, Nadal, Usain Bolt, etc.

So, one of the things that I've heard people comment on with regard to this one is that they're both people who have this incredible uncanny ability to contort, but ultimately be in control of their body. So, like, you know, as comedians, so that's interesting. The other thing that's there is that they're both really provocative and violent in their humor. So they're both really kind of almost like, you know, they, both of them had this way of their slapstick, right, but there's a punch, and there's a kind of violence in the way that they contort twist, you know, and, and make humor and that almost like that twisted side of them is, like if you think about the mask if you ever saw that movie with Jim Carrey. There's a dark edge to both Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey as well.

So I thought those were two really interesting ones. I can't say that I fully understand the, you know, Mars and Capricorn with both of them. But the thing that came to my mind again was their ability to contort and control their bodies in amazing ways, which is definitely a Mars Capricorn thing, and then also that they both have this kind of slapstick violent form of humor and Saturn is also like Pan is a God of humor and dark humor, usually, so there's an edge to both of them that I think is really interesting, even though they're Beloved, you know, they're, they're just like, in some ways, they're, they don't seem like dark characters at all. But anyway, Jim Carrey is certainly later in his career, taking on many more dark and interesting roles as well.

Okay, so if you know anything more about Jerry Lewis, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, that's what I've got for you guys. I hope that this edition of my Planets in Profile Series was interesting and that you learned some new things about Mars and Capricorn. I have one left in the series, which is Mars in Aquarius, so hopefully, I will get that done next month when Mars moves into Aquarius. Okay, leave your comments in the comment section. If you have Mars and Capricorn, what's it like? What do you what do you notice? Do you have anything in common with any of the characters in the cast that I went through today? I'd love to hear your thoughts. All right, take it easy. Bye.