Makara is the tenth rashi, the Vedic sign of the makara, a mythic sea-creature, part crocodile or part fish, corresponding to Capricorn. In jyotisha it is ruled by Saturn (Shani), and it is the sign of Mars's exaltation. Its quality is movable (chara), the cardinal mode, and its element is earth (prithvi tattva). Jyotisha reads Makara through Saturn's discipline and the makara's patient climb from the depths: ambition, structure, endurance, and the slow building of lasting achievement. As a sidereal sign it is fixed to the stars and runs about 24 degrees behind tropical Capricorn. Saturn's rulership and Mars's exaltation here are dignities shared with Western astrology. The tenth-house associations of career and status align with Makara's earthy, worldly ambition in the tradition's reading.
Makara marks the sharpest divergence of any rashi from its Greek original: the Sanskrit names a mythical aquatic creature, part crocodile and part fish, with no goat in it at all, where the Greek aigokeros it renders means precisely goat-horned, the hybrid goat-fish still visible in the Western Capricorn's own symbol. The transmission runs through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek astrological text of roughly the second through fourth centuries CE, built on the twelve equal signs Babylonian celestial divination had fixed by the fifth or fourth century BCE, absent from the older Vedic corpus entirely. Saturn's rulership and Mars's exaltation in Makara belong to a later classical layer, standardly credited to compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE.
Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with The Yavanajataka of SphujidhvajaDavid Pingree, Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree