The strangest creature in the zodiac is the sea-goat, with the front half of a goat and the tail of a fish. It looks like an invention of Greek myth, but it is far older than Greece. A goat-fish appears in Mesopotamian art more than a thousand years before the Greek stories were written.
The goat-fish of Babylon
Babylonian astronomers called the constellation Suhurmasha, the goat-fish, and linked it to Enki, or Ea, the god of fresh water and wisdom, who rose each day from the sea. The creature appears on boundary stones and seals from about 2000 BCE. The Greeks took over the picture and gave it a new story. The astronomer Eratosthenes wrote that the god Pan, when the monster Typhon attacked the gods, jumped into the Nile to escape. He was in such a hurry that only his lower half changed into a fish, and the upper half stayed a goat. Zeus honored him with a place in the stars.
The winter gate
At the winter solstice the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky and then starts to rise again. When the zodiac was named, that turning point lay in Capricorn, so the sun was said to be "born" there. Writers like Macrobius called Capricorn the gate through which souls climb back up to the gods. The Roman emperor Augustus, who treated Capricorn as his sign, put the sea-goat on his coins.
A sign of climbing
In astrology Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, the planet of time, patience and hard work. The glyph is thought to combine the goat's horn with a fish tail.
How to find it
Capricornus is a late-summer and autumn constellation, shaped like a wide, upside-down triangle or a smile. To find it, look to the south of bright Altair in Aquila. It is dim, and a dark sky helps, but its shape is easy to recognize once you see it.
On the star chart
On Hall's chart the goat has a pale, shaggy coat and long twisted horns, and its fish tail curls around into a deep blue-green coil. It's one of the most striking of the twelve plates.
Little-known facts
- The Tropic of Capricorn on the map is named for the old position of the solstice. Today the sun is in Sagittarius at the solstice, because of precession.
- Algedi, one of the brightest stars in Capricorn, is from the Arabic word for the kid, a young goat.
- Deneb Algedi, the "tail of the goat," is an eclipsing binary that varies slightly in brightness.
- The sea-goat appears in Indian astrology as Makara, a similar sea monster.
- Capricornus has no bright stars. Its brightest, Deneb Algedi, is only about third magnitude.
Capricorn appears on our:
