Capricorn Sun (yin, earth, cardinal), Sagittarius Moon (yang, fire, mutable, waning crescent phase)
Adjacent signs can have some difficulty working together, as they tend to be antidotes to one another. You could see the calm, purposeful strength of the Capricorn Sun as providing a steadying anchor for the enthusiastic, explore-in-all-directions Sagittarius Moon, which in turn encourages the Capricorn Sun to lighten up a bit. But they’re in danger of simply neutralising one another and leaving you feeling frustrated. The advice with adjacent signs is often to alternate between the two; to get a bit of a yin-yang flow going. You could also try letting the Sun be in charge, i.e., the motivation, and then using the Moon to carry out the resulting tasks. This allows both planets to act in their natural way. So – perhaps a good time to tackle enthusiastically something you normally find offputting or difficult, or to take charge of something useful, necessary, important, and find a way to make it fun. Bear in mind that Mercury is retrograde, so this doesn’t mean launching new projects, but rather working on existing or old ones; the waning crescent phase of the Moon echoes this, suggesting this week is the time for tying up the loose ends of this lunar cycle (which began with the Sagittarius New Moon on December 16th, and ends with the Capricorn New Moon and solar eclipse on January 15th).
Sun, Venus and Mean Node conjoin at 21+ Capricorn:
This is interesting. The north node is generally considered to point to a path of growth or evolution i.e., to the most difficult, farthest from the comfort zone, but most ultimately rewarding and helpful direction. The south node is the opposite; comfortable, familiar, but potentially stagnation. So the nodes represent the past and the future, in terms of the evolutionary path. Sue Tompkins points out, and I’ve found this super-useful, “When attempting to understand the Nodes, it is essential that emphasis be placed on the nodal rulers. To view the Nodes merely by sign and house will almost always be misleading.” (from The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook by Sue Tompkins, p. 305).
This week we have a picture of the sky seeming to bend over backwards to bring these polar opposites closer together. The Sun and Venus highlight and “make attractive” the north node. The south node’s ruler, the Moon, enters Capricorn, the north node’s sign, overnight Tuesday/Wednesday; i.e., you could say the south node is moving towards the north and effectively opposing itself. The north node’s ruler, Saturn, is (a) exalted in Libra and (b) about to station retrograde (Wednesday) i.e., to go backwards, reaching towards the past. It’s as if the nodes are reaching for one another and trying to bridge the gap, bending time, bringing past and future together and making an evolutionary leap eminently possible.
This kind of symbolism also makes a lot of sense between two eclipses; eclipses are all about the nodes, they can only happen on the nodes, and tend to leave a feeling of time having accelerated and everything having changed. I notice the time between eclipses often feels a bit dreamlike, only realising later how much things moved on right under our noses.