Michael Zizis
3 min readJan 9, 2024

THE OLD GOAT AND THE NEW OPPORTUNITIES

By Mike Zizis

Attention astrologers, please relocate this new Moon for your local coordinates.

“I use”, hard work, focused restrictive vision, no time for your silly jokes, get this done at all costs, create order and damn the price in human blood and misery, do it the right way, worship orthodoxy.

These are all traditional Capricorn tropes and clichés. And they are indeed part of the picture. Part. The Greeks tell the tale of Amalthea; the nurse goat who nurtured the abandoned baby Greek God Zeus.

When incorporating this new Moon into your meditations, which is always a good thing to do at the beginning of the cycle, it is good to remember that for those of us in the Northern hemisphere the beginning of Capricorn is the beginning of the return of the light. South of the equator this sign symbolizes the return of the cooler days in the increasing hot zones of the earth.

All new moons are an opportunity to begin again. Our violent ape kind seems to have done our utmost to weaponize the distortions of memory. Look around you, Israelis and Palestinians, Ukrainians and the Russian government. Human nature reveals itself at every tick of the clock. We are in love with our violence, with our distortions of memory. We bury the corpses of women and children in our addiction to collective violence.

The new moon in Capricorn like all new moons grants us the universal opportunity to subsume our atavistic violence, in our birth and rebirth of our nurturing qualities.

We are always making choices. We are collectively choosing to revere the murderer Achilles as a victorious male figure, while disregarding the miraculous archetype of the nurturing male — Mary’s Joseph, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, Gabor Mate, MLK, Ryan Reynolds, and that wonderful male teacher who passed through your life sometime ago.

Like the nurturing Amalthea, this new Moon can confer a new grounded and creative vision of firm foundation, in art, science, filial relations, and one’s place In the world. This new Moon is wonderfully supported by Jupiter and Mars in earth signs.

Both individually and collectively — we are too powerful to ignore our appetite for destruction. This new Moon is the new moon of the builder. Take 20 minutes out of your day to ask yourself what it is that you are building. Is it more the same? Is it the open-heart that overrules stupidity and violence? Are you allowing the return of more light into your heart? These are also the gifts of the old goat.

Michael Zizis

40 years as a student of astrology. Born in Pittsburgh