Which tarot card is Capricorn?

Why The Devil carries Capricorn

The visual link is immediate: the Devil in the RWS deck has the horns and legs of a goat, and Capricorn's glyph is the sea-goat. The conceptual link takes longer and is more interesting.

Capricorn is cardinal earth - ambition, structure, material reality and the long climb. The Devil is the card of being bound to material things, and the RWS image is specific about the mechanism: the two figures chained to the block wear loose chains they could lift off over their heads. The bondage is voluntary and unexamined. That is the Capricornian failure mode exactly - a structure built for a reason, still being served long after the reason expired.

Saturn rules Capricorn and also carries The World, the final trump. The pairing is the sharpest in the deck: Saturn as limitation experienced as a trap, and Saturn as limitation experienced as completion. Same planet, same principle of boundary, opposite relationship to it.

The difficult register

Upright the card already describes the shadow. Reversed it is usually read as the chains coming off - recognising a constraint as chosen is most of the work of ending it.

The three Capricorn decans and their cards

Capricorn spans thirty degrees, divided into three decans of ten. Each has its own planetary ruler under the Chaldean order and its own pip card from the Suit of Pentacles — which is how a Minor Arcana card can be placed against a stretch of the calendar.

The Capricorn court cards

Capricorn is earth, so its court belongs to the Suit of Pentacles — steady, practical and slow to move.