On the Nature of Capricorn

by Malvin Artley		print version
		print version (graphics)

CAPRICORN FULL MOON 2004

Merry Christmas Everyone!

With Christmas coming, business goes into a mad rush before the holiday shut-down period and the week before Christmas can be a hectic one for my trade. This past week was a bit of a departure from the seeming endless string of days, broken machines and correspondence. I meet many interesting people and go into some strange work spaces in my travels. This week I found myself at an Air Force base quoting the maintenance of the machines for their maintenance department’s shop. It is a surreal experience to enter such an area. All at once I felt a fascination at the new sights being presented to me, an ominous feeling knowing the purposes for which all the military hardware could be used, anxiety about putting a foot wrong somehow and what could happen as a result, a flood of memories from my childhood, remembrance of the fighting forces scattered throughout the world, and a feeling that, somehow, this was a sort of graduation—that something greater was beginning to present itself—and that brings its own sort of giddiness and anxiety as well. More on the last point later. As I walked into the main hangar where the maintenance shop is, there before my eyes was a Blackhawk helicopter and a jet fighter plane. For a civilian, that was quite a sight. Everyone knows those things are there, but to see one up close is an experience in itself. The machines I was there to quote suddenly seemed a pale comparison to the technology that was there before me—and I didn’t really see that much. But, the thought was there and there were millions of man-hours and a lot of bright people represented by those two machines in themselves.

Like most boys, I played endless hours of “Army” with the boys in the neighborhood when I was a kid. We would all fancy ourselves war heroes and dream endlessly about piloting a plane or other piece of hardware like the ones I saw, giving the “enemy” his due and saving the world in the process. Sometimes it was just a lot of fun to blast things and create general mayhem with our imaginary foes. What’s the old saying?—Boys will be boys. It is strange what gives boys in particular those impulses. But, somehow we all managed to grow out of it and become men who would rather make love than war and who knew deep within our hearts that we could never really do the things that we played at as kids except if our families and homelands were threatened. As I stood there and stared at the objects of some of my boyhood fantasies, all of those memories came flooding back. A part of me was going “Cool!”,but now my thoughts were not of what they could do, but of what they represented in so many areas—human inventiveness, collective effort, human achievement, state-of-the-art technology, the pain of human conflict, so on and so forth. So, would I still like to go up in one of those machines? You bet! Would I like to “see action” in one? Not unless lives depended upon it—and even then I wouldn’t like it, to understate the fact.

The preceding hardly sounds like a Christmas story, but Capricorn is not really about Christmas, although Christmas has an awful lot to do with Capricorn, as we shall see. I will, however, have some Christmas cheer a bit later on. These past weeks –and, indeed, the past months—have been a busy time as the year winds down to its inevitable close. The Personages who oversee the well-being of our beautiful little world are entering their sabbatical and reflection on the year that was and the one that is to be as the Sun moves into Capricorn. This has been a full year for so many of us and the times seem only to get busier and more demanding as the days click by. Maybe that is just my own perception, but I am hearing people say similar things wherever I go. Capricorn is a period in the yearly cycle that is very much given over to reflection, assessment, adjustment and renewal of relationships. It is also a time when recognition comes, but what I mean by this is more an inner recognition of things achieved, things needing to be done and of one’s own inner standing in relation to groups, both inner and outer.

One thing that becomes beautifully clear to anyone who studies the inner side of astrology for long enough is that the mythology and stories that describe all of the astrological signs are actually allegories for the great Lives that called the signs forth and Who guide our planet still from the inner planes—the lofty centers of divine consciousness. A sign is both a representation and an emanation of a living Being, a Being of immense size, composed of innumerable Lives, of very ancient origin (earlier even than the beginnings of our present solar system), of infinite wisdom and compassion and—most interestingly—composed of Lives who were all once human far back in the mists of cosmic history (far back to us, anyway). I have spoken in previous letters about the great Hierarchies of Being that the signs represent. What did not get stated in those letters is that what I was outlining was actually only the outer appearance of those Lives. The true story is more fantastic still. There is a subjective side to the astrological signs that describes both the state of consciousness of those Lives and their relation to all other lives and Hierarchies. Some of these Lives date back hundreds of trillions of years if the information we are given is to be believed. It all seems inconceivable. Then again, what is a few hundred trillion years in eternity? Truth is much more fantastic than any fiction.

Let’s get back to more earthly matters and closer time lines, though. There will have been two Capricorn full moons this year. The first one was on the 4^th of January this year. So, we could say that 2004 was bounded by the 2 Capricorn moons. It is a sort of “Blue Year” in terms of Capricorn moons and points to the exceeding emphasis of Saturn and this most mysterious sign for 2004. It is a year that has seen the ascendancy of the conservative powers in governments, the rise of the Religious Right in politics, the Abu Garib prison scandal, sexual scandals with the church, on Pitcairn Island, with child pornography and with football clubs (in Australia), the tragedy of Beslan, the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia, the death of Yassar Arafat with consequent changes in policy in the mid-East to come, the achievements of the athletes at the Olympics and a marriage between a prince and a commoner, to name but a few of the main events of the year. We have seen the triumph of the human spirit and the depths of human darkness, true to the nature of Capricorn. Of course, we see these types of things every year, but 2004 just seemed to feel particularly loaded with extremes and to be more poignant somehow. It is of interest that we will not have a Capricorn full moon in 2005, and that the lunar year for 2005 will be what is known as a Doubly Blind year—generally considered to be inauspicious and indicating a loss of direction. Whatever we personally thought of 2004, though, it has been a year that will have marked milestones for a great many people, myself included.

Traditionally, Capricorn is the sign that marks milestones and achievement in the public eye. It is one of those signs where the orthodox and esoteric rulers are the same, that ruler being Saturn, whereas the ruler of the Hierarchy represented by the sign is Venus. So, in Capricorn we have a curious blending of energies, seemingly at odds with eachother from the orthodox perspective, but productive of powerful results from standpoint of the inner side of things. Capricorn is said to rule the human persona esoterically, and it brings with it the Light of Initiation, that Light which leads to the mountaintop—the pinnacle of human achievement, and the place where union with God is finally known by the little self. Objectively, it does represent the human persona with all the highs and lows that implies. Subjectively, though, it is the higher Self that stands behind this persona and gives it birth and evolution through the long series of lives we experience as humans and through the long ages of struggle to return to the heart of God via the path of human experience. This word “experience”—the results of that, more to the point,--are what life as a Capricorn type brings to a person. The recognition of achievement through hard-won experience—that is what ultimately colors the Capricorn native.

I have written much on Venus this year, on its symbolism, its action and its effects. It is one of the most important planets from the human perspective because it does stand for the Soul and for our relation to our own higher Self. Through the sign of Capricorn we get to the fullness of its meaning to us, though, strange as that may sound. Most people do not equate Capricorn with a loving nature. Yet, the struggle through the experience of Capricorn is exactly how we are led to finally know the fullness of love in our nature and eventual liberation from our struggles and the pull of Saturn. The two planets actually work hand-in-hand.

Venus has been equated with Lucifer, the Bright Morning Star. This is true both in symbolism and throughout all cultures, though worded in different ways. Since most readers of this letter come from a Christian tradition, perhaps the following facts will shed a little light on a few things that have troubled the Christian world for almost its full duration and hopefully go a ways toward showing some of the deeper meanings behind astrology, religions and life on this planet in general. I have spoken along these lines before, but a bit more needs to be said on the matter of Venus and Lucifer, and it is through Capricorn that the mystery of this is finally solved. Capricorn is associated with the mental plane, with the element fire, with the Will to manifest, and rules the Hierarchy called The Crocodiles, or Makara, the Mystery. We all know the story of how Lucifer was cast into Hell, there to suffer for eternity because of his sins, because he thought he knew more and better than God, because he incited rebellion and because he ceased to love God more than himself. What most people don’t realize, though, is that this story is actually the story in allegory of how all humans gained their personalities and how we all eventually come back to the heart of God and leave the fires of Hell forever, being richer for the experience and able then to act as wise agents of God’s Will, forever and always.

Lucifer being cast into Hell is an allegory for Venus being the Lord of the mental plane. It is an allegory of a time, far in our past, of when the great Lords came to our planet, when what we now know as the higher Selftook bodies among the most advance animal-men of the time. We were then given an angelic body that would stand as sentinel of our progress, as receptacle of our garnered wisdom, as an outpost of the higher Self, as an eye through which that higher Self could view and interact with the lower worlds and which would eventually usher us into the angelic worlds and which would be to us the closest thing that we could call “Heaven on Earth”. That body is what we call the causal, or Soul-body. The fires of Hell are simply the matter of the mental realm. The fiery pit is what the clairvoyant would call the causal body—our Soul-body. Eternity is symbolic of the period of time it takes for us to evolve back to the heart of God and to leave the cycle of birth and death as humans. That period is millions of years, which is an eternity to the little human Mind. The wailing and gnashing of teeth in Hell is simply the hard road of experience as through life after life we build in all the experience necessary to be fit instruments of service to God and saviors in our own right. And, Saturn—Satan—is the lord who spurs us onward to the goal through the tasks and struggles he puts in our path. It is through the mind that we manifest our little worlds and make the choices that govern the path of our experience. It is through the pain of mistakes and the joy of achievements that we adjust ourselves more and more each passing day toward God’s image and slowly climb out of the smoking pit of our own illusions toward the supernal Light of the Heaven worlds and the bliss of omnisciensce and at-one-ment with the higher Self—and thus with all Selves.

Venus represents both the causal body and the Self that brought it into being. It is through this causal body that we build in that mysterious thing we call “personality”. The story of Lucifer’s fall from Grace is a story that resides in the subconscious of any Capricornian type, and Saturn ill-aspected in a person’s chart can bring spectacular falls from grace. It is a poignant reminder and a warning that the ethic of the Soul must be remembered and adhered to. Material ambition, for which Capricorn is famous, must give way to selfless service and a giving heart. And if the person strays from “the path of righteousness”, then Saturn, as karma, soon sets things right. So, the story of Lucifer’s fall is the story of every person. So, too, is the story of Jesus—a story that is, again, universal through human culture, though clothed in differing words.The story of Lucifer’s fall is the descent of humanity into materiality. It is the story of infant humanity. The story of Jesus, or any world Savior, is the story of humanity that has achieved thorough the long ages of struggle, and who has earned the right to sit once again at the right hand of God. It is the story of humanity matured. In the story of Lucifer, the human is born from the beast. In the story of Jesus, the human is born among the beasts, but is not of them, and is accompanied by wisdom, the wise Ones seeking him out.