Sagittarius is a hitchhiker. Sagittarius is a horse girl. Sagittarius is like when a new commercial comes on and its baseline volume is so much louder than the rest of the programming that you have to run over to the TV to turn it down. Sagittarius is always down to have an experience. Sagittarians are basically like labradors in that they love anyone and everyone who will take them on lots of walks.

The entry-level discourse on Sagittarius is that they’re basically every person you’ve ever argued with on Facebook, in addition to being every person you’ve ever encountered on a dating app who has made “liking travel” their entire personality. These assumptions are not entirely without basis, but they’re not the whole truth. And if the centaur is in tireless pursuit of one thing, it’s truth and wholeness.

Jupiter, Sag’s ruling planet, considers itself responsible for creating meaning out of information, for giving things a sense of coherence, for powering the engine of our epistemologies, for guiding the arrow of our faith. In Pisces, its other domicile, Jupiter might be more like Buddha, simply holding up a flower in front of a crowd of his disciples. In Sagittarius, Jupiter delivers a rousing, fiery sermon. We trade subtlety for the animating spirit of conviction. The yelling is sort of the whole point. When we know what’s right within our soul, when the importance of that belief energizes us, we say it with our whole chest, and that’s what Sagittarius is all about.

Sagittarius is also especially good at contextualizing Scorpio’s mysteries within a larger framework of higher principles — the “big picture,” as some would call it. The cliche is that we’re dealing with an archetype that’s always buried in a philosophy book, that’s obsessed with its own ardent version of “right” and “wrong,” that will call you out on your shit when you’re walking on the wrong side of that line, that has the energy and the time to debate you about it in a 50+ comment thread, too.

Sagittarius might be a mutable sign, but it’s not flexible to the point of collapsing into nothingness. To be fair, Sagittarius is open-minded a great deal of the time, but its open-mindedness extends more often to trying new experiences versus being moved from its truth. In fact, our truth is often informed by our experience. The more we experience, the closer we get to a sense of certainty around that truth. The gospel is unfuckwithable when the gospel is a direct transmission.

Despite what any of this might sound like, Sagittarius is abundantly fun at parties and they make an ideal adventure buddy if you need someone who’s down to ride. On a metaphysical level, Sagittarius refers to the ongoing expansion of consciousness that’s part and parcel with being alive. We’re all moving targets with an appetite for discovery. The constant hunger for more knowledge and new types of experiences derives from the part of the human spirit that is genuinely hungry for a new perspective. Yeah, yeah, Sagittarius likes to go to school and live out of a camper van. But not everything worth knowing is confined to academia, and intercultural fluency is something you can develop without ever buying a plane ticket.

As the sign of mutable fire, Sagittarius brings the party, spreads the hype, and generally doesn’t like to be contained. Sorry for this, but it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of centaurs at a frat party. It’s also easy to understand why they need so much space to roam. Jupiter is a literal gas giant that shimmers in its own hugeness. The natural inclination of fire is to escalate, sprawl out, and proliferate. Sagittarius is about fire as a wilderness, not fire as an ornament.

That may or may not be a good excuse for why they’re late or why they burnt the popcorn or why the IKEA bed frame they assembled themselves is barely holding itself together by a thread. In the Sagittarian universe, happy-go-lucky optimism is more or less the law of the land, or at least a sense that everything will probably turn out fine, even if you fudged a few details. Sagittarius flies by the seat of its pants precisely because they thrive so well in just the right amount of chaos, especially if it means they don’t have to constantly dwell on all the things that could go wrong.

The Sagittarian urge to abhor an instruction manual also has a lot to do with the fact that Mercury experiences its detriment here. We’re not aiming for perfection — we’re just aiming for the vision, or the vibe. The granular details might get scrambled, but it tends to all come out in the wash the same.

This is probably why you might need to cut Sagittarius just a little bit of slack when their words come out wrong or don’t land exactly how they intended. When a Sagittarius blurts something out, it’s usually a mix of hilarious and true and just a little rude. We know and love Sagittarius for the blunt honesty, but they also practically invented the concept of word vomit. In the life of a grand, breathless run-on sentence, there is no punctuation — only cadence. That it gets to run on and on is the vital force that keeps it moving.

This post was originally published on 12/14/2021 on thedailyhunch.com.