This month the sky is full of planets in Capricorn turning into Aquarius, two dramatically contrasting signs.

Let’s take a moment to liberate them from their stereotypes, the better to navigate the jarring shifts of January.

Slow down

Sober old Capricorn is not only rule-bound but security-conscious. Usually, its emphasis is on professional and material security, but at the Full Moon on January third, emotional security (Cancer) will also be in the mix.

For the first week and a half of the month, the Sun, Venus and Mars are all neck and neck in Capricorn. The atmosphere seems to slow down. If there’s a tortoise-and-hare race going on in your life, put your money on the tortoise.

It’s as if the whole world is having a Saturn Return. Whatever our age, we slam into adulthood. On the New Moon of the 18^th, with the Sun, Moon and Mercury all bundled up in late Capricorn, we may be asking ourselves: What does it mean to be a grown up? Where have we tried to dodge responsibility?

Have we foolishly imagined we could outsmart the clock and calendar?

Unsung hybrid

We all know about the goat part of the Capricorn icon, but what about that fish tail?

The goat part signifies the drive to steadily climb the ladder of success (that is, whatever our society defines as success). But the fish part doesn’t have much to do with earthly pursuits at all. It’s symbolic of universal consciousness, which informs worldly success but it isn’t attached to it.

These two impulses combine to make a stupendous combo, when used well. But it tells us something, doesn’t it, about the values of our place and time, that contemporary astrology tends to forget about the fish part.

Capricorn is usually described purely in material and professional terms, omitting the part about the oceanic vision required to achieve anything meaningful.

Earth into Air

Mercury is in Capricorn for most of the month. If you have this natal placement yourself, you know that it needs to think through ideas methodically, building towards an intellectual end-point. You’re constructing a conceptual edifice, brick by mental brick.

On Jan 20^th, when Mercury enters Aquarius, there is a shift. By way of analogy, if Capricorn is applied math, Aquarius is theoretical math. Aquarian thinking doesn’t care about practical considerations, and it doesn’t care about organizing its thoughts. It pursues ideas for their own sake, undistracted by counterarguments.

Sure, it’s stubborn; fixed signs always are. Mercury in Aquarius has to be tenacious, in order to stick with ideas that most would give up on. This placement is associated with invention because when you’re entering unfamiliar conceptual territory, you need to be bull-headed to pursue it.

By the time the Sun enters Aquarius (1/19) we’ll hopefully have accepted our inner eccentric.

Different strokes

Also keep your eye on the shift with Venus, which moves from Capricorn (a realistic, restrained social style) into Aquarius (an intellectual, independent one) on the seventeenth.

The next day, Venus catches up to Pluto. There are power dynamics coursing under the surface of even the most convivial relationships. To ignore them invites emotional peril.

Neptune makes its move

Neptune is back in Aries on Jan 26^th, revving up for its fateful conjunction with Saturn. This epochal transit has been toying with us for months. Now it’s ready to blossom.

The tenure of Neptune (fog) in this uber-yang sign (war) will continue, of course, well past the Saturn conjunction. Astrophiles will be hearing a lot about this stunning paradox: the most nebulous of planets in the most forthright of fire signs.

Check your chart for the first degree of Aries, and listen for the starting gun.