Picture the scene: it’s a balmy (yet somehow crisp) morning in early December. The king of gods is shaking off a hangover in his purple Lebowski robe — hair of the dog, as has been his morning custom for the last year. It’s not exactly easy on the body to keep the party raging to the satisfaction of the world’s literal and metaphorical woo boys, but when Jupiter’s home, he’s kind of the Woo Boy Manifest. Besides — he can whip up a full menu of custom cocktails while he’s operating from his own bar cart. The transition from Jupiter in Sagittarius to Jupiter in Capricorn is basically the exact moment that he realizes he’s exhausted his prodigal supply of booze and must venture into the cold for more. Except now, a hangover is settling over the land, and he suddenly finds himself looking at an eviction notice. The neighbors have complained enough, the guests have all left, and it’s time to clean up and get his shit together again, because epic ragers aren’t in the cards for the foreseeable future.

With Jupiter moving from the sign of its domicile into the sign of its fall, we might feel a little bit as though someone just let air out of a giant balloon.

Jupiter is a gas giant, and when it’s empowered, it just gets bigger and gassier. On Saturn’s turf, resources must be carefully rationed, which goes against the Jupiterian principle of “yes and more.”

And by the way, this isn’t to suggest that Jupiter in Sagittarius was a magical panacea that made life amazing for everyone. The objective scope of what’s happening in the world should speak for itself in that sense. An empowered Jupiter wasn’t enough to cancel out the grim, totalitarian confluence of Saturn and Pluto, and Jupiter’s gifts can occasionally arrive as a Trojan Horse of sorts. Jupiter in Sagittarius can be a wildfire, and it can also be a house of cards that’s precariously top-heavy and pretty much sustained by a wing and a prayer.

What we can thank Jupiter in Sagittarius for was its ability to provide us with some amount of levity and hope in the face of darkness — a certain degree of faith that may otherwise have been hard to locate in 2019. Jupiter wants to overlook the “here and now” in favor of what’s on the distant horizon. Our ability to visualize the future beyond the mess we’re currently in was the crux of this medicine.

But enough visualizing — it’s time to make measurable progress in that direction.

This is a very “just the basics” phase of Jupiterian expansion that will require us to correct for some of the excesses of the last year. We can only take what we can carry on our own backs, so it’s time to get rid of the bloat — to trim the fat, so to speak.

This last year’s transit of Jupiter through Sagittarius was also colored by its squares to Neptune, which highlighted its visionary potential as much as it made us all more prone toward delusion. Jupiter’s ingress into Capricorn will feel a bit like a burst bubble bringing us back to earth, but we might also have the benefit of hindsight now to understand that our gullibility helped us take chances and engage life with bravery. Even if you were a little naive about it, was it really all for naught?

We won’t have the luxury of engaging our more fanciful pipe dreams as we move through the next year, and that’s because Jupiter in Capricorn brings a narrowing of the field of possibility. In Sagittarius, it was easier to believe that the sky was the limit. Now, we’re being asked to focus on substantial probabilities. Rather than waste your juice talking about all the amazing things you might do someday, can you identify one or two goals you’re currently equipped to move the needle on and make the most of what’s actually available to you at the moment?

Jupiter is wisdom, and it’s also the temple. And during its stay in Capricorn, we’re going to the church of experts and those who have attained the kind of mastery we seek.

Leaning into the guidance of tradition, or at least what’s worked for others, is the conceptual lens we’ll be working with this year. But so, too, will we be learning from our own mistakes. Capricorn follows a methodical, trial-and-error approach. Personal experience (and time) are the true markers of a seasoned expert.

Another way to think of it: Sagittarius is a centaur who traverses the lateral reaches of the globe, and Capricorn is a goat that climbs its chosen mountain. With Jupiter in Capricorn, growth occurs in a hierarchical, upward motion versus a broad horizontal sweep, which means we’ll have gravity slowing us down a bit. Can we focus our efforts and harness the weight as a form of resistance training?

This notion that it’s time to stop overdoing it at the banquet and opt for a more conservative approach will probably be reflected in the economy as well.

The last time Jupiter was in Capricorn was 2008, which marked the beginning of the Great Recession. This sort of underscores the notion that we don’t often measure the health of the economy by how secure the average person is — it’s more about how bullish or fearful investors feel. And the last time Jupiter moved into Capricorn, no amount of Pollyannaism was enough to conceal the fact that predatory lending practices had given form to an economy that was due to collapse in on itself.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that we get this transit once every 12 years, and we haven’t had an epic global recession each time. But some amount of contraction is likely, and this may be a test of how well we’ve winter-proofed ourselves to endure periods of “less.” Many people don’t have the luxury of a savings account or family resources to fall back on, so this can’t always look like “saving for a rainy day.” Sometimes it’s more about cultivating skills that will be readily in demand, or building strong communities, or remembering the resilience that helped you get through previous times of difficulty.

Finally, remember that Jupiter in Capricorn isn’t occurring in a vacuum.

It’s merely arriving in the wake of what Saturn and Pluto have already accomplished in this territory, which doesn’t look like a “destruction” so much as a “revealing what’s been festering and crumbling into a state of disrepair.”

Jupiter will form three conjunctions to Pluto throughout the course of 2020, which will feel a lot more constructive than the Saturn/Pluto script we’re currently running. This is a highly resourceful combo that sort of amounts to discovering buried treasure beneath the structure that just collapsed. It’s also a signature of formidable wealth, and with billionaires becoming such a talking point in the leadup to the election, it’ll be interesting to see whether the rich further consolidate their power under this alignment, or whether morality (Jupiter) combined with splintering (Pluto) will fundamentally change the terms of their hegemony. But for all of us, regardless, there’s an opportunity to take back our power and grow into our own influence.

With Saturn, there was a bit of an emptying. Jupiter will cover its tracks to fill the cup again. It may not be top-shelf liquor, but it’ll likely be something we can still appreciate — perhaps even moreso because we really worked for it.

This post was originally published on 12/2/2019 on thedailyhunch.com.