Linda Goodman's Sun Signs

by Linda Goodman

  Who else could you load up with a pile of work that would stagger a horse—but not a goat? He’s your dependable safety valve when things get snarled and disorganized, and he comes through for you without making a big fuss about it. I doubt if he ever dashes into your office. He walks in, and he probably checks first to see if you’re busy. His clothes and manner are both conservative, and he’s the only one in the bunch who never gets caught without his umbrella when it rains. He won’t lose his brief case in the subway, or forget where he left his lunch. His lunch? Naturally. What else do you think he carries in that brown paper bag? Resturants are expensive. Besides, he hates to tip and fight the crowds.

  The last time you saw him flash a bright, toothpaste grin was when your assistant mentioned she didn’t know how the office could run without him. He’s not the grinning type. Or the foolish, frivolous type. He may tell quite a few jokes in his wry and dry way, or take a discreet peek at a pretty girl, but Saturn will never permit him to pull out all the stops. Most of the time, he minds his own business. The Capricorn is more inclined to frown sternly on the casual jollities of the gay extroverts than to join them, although his own brand of cynical humor can be hilarious. When he’s in form, it’s hard to top him.

  You have to admit he has unique and valuable assets. Your Capricorn employee is the one you sic on the tough, suspicious, Internal Revenue man. When the goat gets through with him, he’s not as suspicious and far less tough. He may even be courteous and respectful. It’s not everyone who can successfully intimidate a tax man. Remember that high pressure character, who wanted to sell you several thousand dollars worth of limited edition Omas Gaia gold and crystal pens to pep up your assistant’s morale? After two minutes with your Capricorn man, the poor soul was pressing the down button on the elevator, looking like a fallen souffle.

  Somehow, you get the impression your Capricorn employee is going to advance much higher in life, but it’s hard to figure how he conveys it. There’s nothing aggressive or openly ambitious about him. He’s not a flashy, ruthless climber. Let’s try that again. He’s not a flashy climber. In his own mild, inconspicuous way, the goat is coldly determined to get where he’s going. Those who prevent his steady progress or impose on him will soon find he’s no Casper Milquetoast. He’ll accept his responsibilities without complaint or resentment, but he won’t be pushed too far. Capricorns with severe planetary afflictions in their natal birth charts can be astonishingly cruel and ruthless. But the average goat simply gives people a grumpy growl and a black look when they tweak his horns.

  Just in case you have one of the exceptions to the rule in your office, I’d better tell you about a Capricorn I knew who worked in a donut shop. He probably had a Leo ascendant or the Moon was in Gemini or Aries when he was born. This goat wore expensive, Italian shoes and big cuff links. He made more romantic conquests in a week than other men do in a lifetime—or said he did. He enjoyed telling off-color stories, and when he wasn’t flirting with the female customers or impressing everyone with his toughness, he tossed off some pretty big bubble schemes and way-out promotions. Most people would never peg him as a Capricorn, but they should look a little closer and listen more carefully.

  For all his outrageous flirting, when he called his fiancée on the phone, his tone was tender and protective. A man who dared to swear in her presence would never have tried it twice. He made it clear that she was a lady. In front of his parents, he was subdued and respectful. Anyone past fifty he treated with a courtesy bordering on reverence. With children, he was as gentle as Whistler’s mother. Powerful, famous people with status turned him into a humble, worshiping admirer. He was constantly telling friends and strangers that he once sat next to a glamorous movie actress on a plane or about the time he was invited to a reception at the Governor’s mansion. Everything he bought was wholesale, including those Italian shoes. He had the undisputed first prize as the tightest tipper in town. A dollar would never be spent where a dime could be saved. In other words, underneath that false bravado was a typical Saturn nature. This apparently aggressive, extroverted goat turned pink at a compliment and painfully shy in the presence of anyone he thought was upper register. If you need any more proof that he was a Capricorn, he eventually bought the chain of donut shops. And by the way, he didn’t risk his own cash on those wild promotions. It was always somebody else’s.

  The typical Capricorn employee is conscientious almost to a fault. If he makes a mistake or commits an error of judgment, he’s miserable. Falling down on his job depresses him. He’ll come back to the office and work overtime if you need him, but he won’t like it if you make him miss dinner at home with his family too many nights. The goat prefers to tend to his domestic responsibilities first, and return later to the grindstone, if necessary. You won’t find him changing jobs often. The Capricorn decides early what the goal will be, and pursues it with unswerving persistence. He is not flighty or undecided about his future. The top of the mountain is never allowed to be obscured by the mist of fanciful dreams and sentimental wishing. Titles usually don’t move him. He’s not seeking glory. He’s after the real position of power: he wants to be the one who guards the fort while the individualists and great idealists are out chasing butterflies. He doesn’t need his name in gold letters on the door to feel important. But don’t fail to increase his area of responsibility at decent intervals, and make sure you pay him enough money so he can keep up with the Joneses. He has to live in the right neighborhood, send his children to the right schools, and his wife has to dress with more taste than her friends. That takes substantial lettuce. The goat will gladly chew on tough leather, pieces of steel and old light bulbs to earn his dessert of green paper lettuce, sprinkled with the caviar of social distinction. His banker may be his closest friend, next to the members of his immediate family.

  Your female Capricorn employee follows the same path as the male up that mountain. Nothing sways her from her determination to seek a position of authority in the firm or marry the boss. It doesn’t matter a lot which it is. As long as she comes out ahead. This woman won’t wear two sets of false eyelashes or jangling bracelets to work and you’ll never catch her spinning daydreams at her desk. The lady goat is a Lady. She’ll rarely raise her voice or indulge in girlish gossip. There are more important things on her mind than who is having an affair with whom and what Emily said about Marilyn getting back late from lunch. After office hours, she may show a little more curiosity. The Saturn woman sometimes lives vicariously on the details of other people’s romances, but she usually won’t indulge herself in discussing them on the boss’s time. That’s logical enough. The boss may someday be her husband. In all fairness, there’s another reason. All goats have a serious sense of duty, a respect for their superiors, and an inner discipline which makes them abstain from office monkeyshines.

  Your Capricorn employees of either sex will be businesslike. They disapprove of people who are late to work, and who waste time in idle chitchat. They have no patience with methods that aren’t sound or procedures that lack common sense, and they’ll rearrange office systems to make sure the organization runs with sensible efficiency. Not all Capricorns are bankers, teachers and accountants. They also make excellent IT managers, researchers, extremely capable dentists, brilliant engineers and architects, and they’re clever at merchandising, manufacturing and politics. Many goats are jewelers, ministers, hotel managers, funeral directors, art dealers or anthropologists, but whatever the occupation, they’ll be serious about it.

  Don’t forget that there’s a creative side to Saturn people. Your Capricorn employee may have a hobby that could surprise you. He could be a Sunday artist, and a very good one, too. He could be a weekend musician, dabble in sculpture, sell real estate, apply his green thumb to a garden, sing in a choir or belong to a drama class. Culture is close to his heart. So is Mother Earth. His real loves are his family, his home, his work, money, prestige, books, art and music in just about that order. Get an Aries, Leo, Gemini or Sagitt
arius employee to travel for your firm. Most Capricorns break out in a nervous rash at the sight of a suitcase. Even if it’s not quite that bad, they’ll be happier catching a commuter train than catching a jet. Anyway, who would keep things nailed down while he’s away? Remember what happened when he took his vacation last summer. Someone in the office went ahead and ordered four dozen of those limited edition Omas Gaia gold and crystal pens.

  AQUARIUS the Water Bearer

  January 21st through February 19th

  Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

  All mimsy were the borogroves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  How to Recognize AQUARIUS

  “In spring, when woods are getting green,

  I’ll try and tell you what I mean:

  In summer, when the days are long,

  Perhaps you’ll understand the song:”

  “For this must ever be

  A secret

  Kept from all the rest

  Between yourself and me.”

  Lots of people like rainbows. Children make wishes on them, artists paint them, dreamers chase them, but the Aquarian is ahead of everybody. He lives on one. What’s more, he’s taken it apart and examined it, piece by piece, color by color, and he still believes in it. It isn’t easy to believe in something after you know what it’s really like, but the Aquarian is essentially a realist, even though his address is tomorrow, with a wild-blue-yonder zip code.

  Like the bewildered Alice, taken through the maze of Wonderland by Aquarian Lewis Carroll, you’ll have to be constantly prepared for the unexpected with Uranians. Generally kindly and tranquil by nature, Aquarians nevertheless enjoy defying public opinion, and they secretly delight in shocking more conventional people with occasional erratic conduct. These normally soft-spoken and courteous souls can suddenly short circuit you with the most amazing statements and actions at the most unpredictable times. The typical Uranian is half Nelson Mandela and half Mickey Mouse. His feet can be wearing sandals, boots, oxfords or loafers, and he’ll seldom bother to check whether they’re appropriate for the occasion. He’ll show up barefoot if he feels like it, and laugh at you for laughing at him. Aquarians often deliberately adopt weird attire to show their refusal to conform.

  You can often recognize people born under this fixed, air sign by their frequent use of the word friend. Aquarian Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats invariably began with, “My friends …” and the typical Uranus question after a broken romance is, “Can’t we still be friends?” Aquarius is neither jaded nor naive, neither enthusiastic nor blasé. Continuous experimentation simply leaves him curious to penetrate the next mystery, and the next mystery could be you. That person, who seems to be either a million miles away mentally, or else dissecting you under an invisible microscope, is probably an Aquarian. It can be disconcerting to discover, after all his intense, flattering curiosity, that he’s just as deeply interested in the personal lives of the corner policeman, the bartender, the bellboy, the night club singer or the inmates of the funny house, as he is in yours. Politics fascinate him, sports absorb him and children intrigue him. But then so do horses, automobiles, elderly people, medical discoveries, authors, astronauts, alcoholics, pianos, pinwheels and prayers—not to mention baseball and Louis Armstrong. Join the crowd and toss your ego in the wastebasket, or his coolly impersonal approach will be sure to bruise it.

  Look for a strange, faraway look in the eyes, as if they contained some kind of magic, mysterious knowledge you can’t penetrate. Aquarius eyes are typically vague, with a dreamy, wandering expression, and often (but not always) blue, green or gray. The hair is frequently straight and silky, likely to be blonde, sandy or light brown; the complexion is pale and the height is usually taller than average (though the ascendant can modify the appearance of any Sun sign). You’ll notice a marked nobility of profile. Uranus features are finely chiseled, suggestive of Roman emperors cut on old gold coins. True Aquarians will often adopt the pose of the drooping head when they’re thinking about a problem, or just after they’ve asked a question. The head drops abruptly forward, or cocks to one side, waiting for your reaction. Curiously, thanks to the dual sexuality of Uranus, there are often feminine characteristics in the male bodies, such as broad hips, for example—and masculine characteristics in the female body, such as broad shoulders.

  Freedom-loving Uranians can be acutely funny, perverse, original, conceited and independent, but they can also be diplomatic, gentle, sympathetic and timid. The Aquarian will almost desperately seek the security of crowds and saturate himself with friendship. Then he’ll fall into a gloomy, morose spell of loneliness, and want to be strictly left alone. But whether he’s mingling or singling, he’ll retain his sharp perception, which is at once both deeper and quicker than others. Uranus makes him a natural rebel, who instinctively feels that all old customs are wrong, and that drastic alteration and revolutionary change is what the world and people need (although if he’s in politics, he’s clever enough not to broadcast his views prematurely and spoil his strategy).

  To this end, Aquarians are always analyzing situations, friends and strangers. It can be disturbing when they start asking point-blank questions, with a bare minimum of tact, as they probe into the heart of your private feelings. When they discover the puzzle wasn’t so complex after all, they become bored, sometimes even upset. Nothing is more insulting than to have an Aquarian tire of his game of microscopic examination and turn to the next interesting person, just when he’s convinced you he thinks you are the most important human being on earth. It stings.

  Despite their fixation on friendship, Aquarians don’t have many intimates. They seek quantity rather than quality in their associations, and they seldom settle down to a steady relationship for more than a limited period. There’s too much to discover around the next corner to remain tied to one or two friendships exclusively. It does little good to make an emotional appeal to such an impersonal nature, but if you touch the heart of an Aquarian (which is not the same thing as mere emotion), he’ll usually get off his bicycle and come back to see what he might have missed.

  A peculiar sort of isolation hangs over the Uranian, and he’s often misunderstood by mankind. That’s because mankind hasn’t yet caught up with the Aquarian Utopia. Since the water bearer lives in the future, coming back only briefly to the present, he can seem just plain pixilated to more mundane souls. He senses this, and it deepens his sense of isolation. But just because others can’t keep up with him is no reason in his opinion to go backwards. So he wanders among his lonely clouds, while we mere mortals wonder what he’s doing way out there. Astrology teaches us that “As the Aquarian thinks, so will the world think in fifty years.” That may be true, but it certainly doesn’t narrow the gap between the Uranus-ruled and the rest of us today. This Sun sign is known as the sign of genius, and so it is, since over seventy percent of the people in the Hall of Fame are either Sun Aquarians or have Aquarian ascendants. On the other hand, a substantially high percentage of those confined in mental institutions, or who drop in for regular couch sessions with an analyst, are also Aquarians. There’s a fine line, they say, between genius and insanity, and your Uranian friends can sometimes make you wonder which side of the line they’re on. A great deal of the confusion is due to man’s tendency to belittle his prophets. The familiar quotes that “they laughed at Fulton and his steamboat,” “they thought Edison was mentally retarded,” and “they wanted to lock up Louis Pasteur,” are examples of the attitude of the materialistic world toward those whose senses are tuned to higher spheres of thought.

  Uranians are a curious mixture of cold, practicality and eccentric instability, and they seem to have an instinctive empathy with the mentally disturbed. It’s a curious fact that almost any Aquarian can substantially reduce the anxiety of the insane simply by talking to them quietly. He has a marvelous knack for calming hysterical people and soothing frightened children. Is it bec
ause of his own thinly-covered, highly acute nervous system that he has such deep understanding?

  The Aquarian outlook is so broad that you’ll seldom find one who is prejudiced, unless there are severe planetary influences in the natal chart. Even then, he’ll be deeply shocked when his prejudice is pointed out. The brotherhood instinct is so strong in him that when a rare Aquarian is guilty of being intolerant, he’s not only unaware of it, he hates the label. Ordinarily, everyone is his brother or sister. He’ll wander through affluent society and the slums alike with his symbolic jar, gathering the waters of knowledge and pouring them out again, except for those occasional lapses into hibernation. But his hiding out periods seldom last long, and before you get a chance to miss him, the Uranian is back gregariously making the rounds again. Don’t try to interrupt his solitude. When he wants to be alone, he wants to be alone, but he hasn’t retired from the mainstream permanently, even if he does take a sudden Uranus notion to get an unlisted phone number. His address hasn’t changed, and neither has he. He can never renounce people for long. Ignore him and he’ll soon be walking around town on those home-made stilts, as alert and inquisitive as ever.

  Ordinarily, it’s difficult to get an Aquarian to make a precise appointment. He’d rather keep it loose, because he doesn’t like to be pinned down to specific duties or obligations at specific times. He prefers a casual “I’ll see you around—maybe sometime Tuesday” to a definite hour for a meeting. (And he sometimes means the second Tuesday of next week.) However, I will say that, once you’ve succeeded in nailing him and he gives you his word he’ll meet you at a particular hour, he will be there on the dot. You can count on it, even set your watch by his punctuality, and you’d better not be late yourself. He’ll show up dependably, unless he’s been kidnapped on the way (which, being an Aquarian, he could be. Anything can happen to these people at any time. I mean but anything).