Saturn in Capricorn

Capricorn is Saturn's night house in Lilly 1659, and Ashmand's 1822 text of Ptolemy gives it to him for its cold and wintry nature. Lilly even uses Saturn in Capricorn as his sample of a planet in its own house, worth five dignities by his count. The sign is cold and dry, an exact match for the planet's temperament in his table.

Adams 1928 is unusually blunt about this meeting. She calls the sign overbalanced toward severity and Saturn a superb planet only when other forces help him, and Lilly's own portrait of a well-placed Saturn lists patience and reserve alongside austerity. Mars is exalted in the same sign, which gives the place a second, hotter claimant.

Lilly gives Saturn only the last five degrees as terms and no face here, a small reminder that owning a sign and holding its subdivisions are separate things. Modern popular astrology reads authority, long effort and respect for structure into the pair, and that reading is modern. The placement lasts about two and a half years, and a birth in that window carries it regardless of temperament.