Aries 27° (April 17)

It actually just might be easier to continue to improvise than it would to come up with some major plan. But the weirdest thing is: I just don’t have all that much rattling around my brain. I am ever slightly challenged in starting my fundraising but also in casting the festival this year. But that always ends up coming together so I’m really not going to worry about that right now. The important thing to do is to move the needle or as we say the spoon. Anyway it does feel good to make some progress and get all the proverbial ducks in a row. I have started an inventory for the various subjects I am covering per sign. I don’t know if you know this but we actually have a proposal in works for a great new book which I am actually quite excited about. So here some thoughts on the sign of Cancer..

If the first (cardinal-fire) sign of Aries is big-bang creation and (fixed-earth) Taurus is the garden, Eden, and the (mutable-air) sign of Gemini is a snapshot of  munching on that apple of sudden consciousness, the Fall, then Cancer (cardinal-water) is the Flood to wash it all—cares and sins— away, to re-create and recover. Flood myths promise passage, deliverance, a simple, cool change, and promise itself. Moon-ruled Cancer is the energy of hope without which there can be no possibility. Someone wise said that. Water symbolizes emotion and intuition. The process of recovery is indeed an emotional one—the Cancer motto is I Feel—one that involves getting to the source of our human emotional being, which is where we tap into our higher power (represented by Cancer’s so-called opposite sign of Capricorn, not actually opposite at all but a higher septave, the relationship between the two providing mountains of metaphorical and metaphysical wisdom to be mined. Cancer is the source, the most vivid interpretation of cardinal- (originating) water; while Capricorn is re-source the mountain lake or reservoir. Cancer people are gushing and Capricorns reserved. Cancer is Hope and Capricorn is Faith.

And they say hope floats; and we venture to guess that whoever they are, they unknowingly tapped into a certain zodiacal understanding; Back to recovery: something we are all in all the time: Cancer people personifying this concept—Noah was a drunk, so he understands the notion of the Fall on a personal level. His personality is hinged on the transition from Gemini to Cancer. If the Fall is about experiencing life as a sudden split—Geminis are the most, and mostly benignly, split-personalities—then the Flood is about immediately moving toward the repair of said split. The whole thing about putting animals together, two by two, onto an airk is about re-pairing. And what is an ark if not a promise, one which we mainly hope we can keep to ourselves. The Cancer symbol can be interpreted as a crab, but also as two peas or seeds in a single pod, in either case floating along, not determining the direction, going with the proverbial flow. All of this, too, being a metaphor, to use a recovery phrase, for living life on life’s terms.

Life, to the Cancerian ideal, is in toto a process of recovery and rehabilitation, repairing any faulty infrastructure in our upbringing, especially, but also any family history pre-birth.  We all decide what we want to retain, and indeed recover, about ourselves, and that which we wish to be washed away, typically elements of self that block or undermine that which we are determined to take on our journey. The fourth astrological house of Cancer is a mysterious one because it rules both the home you come from and  the one you create for yourself; it is, in this way, a verb, a sign of action and movement as befits its cardinal status. Cancer people, as a snapshot of the sign’s energy, are on a journey from birth to mete out that which they want to leave behind from that which they want to characterize their future promise, their early conditioning from their own self-providence. On a less personal level the Cancerian experience is what we collectively pass on—customs, mores, folkways—which is no way divorced from the notions of putting things to rights, securing cultural identity and stability— and also real and metaphoric inheritances from family traits to heirlooms and property, actual real estate. In the Greek flood myth, where the pairing of Deucalion and his wife Pyrra, alone, withstand the entire wiping out of humanity, it is the goddess Themis who appears to them, having made it to the other shore, at the point of recovery, to instruct them on what to do next.

The fact that the authority figure here is female is fitting. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, the symbol of which is a crescent, a nod to the waxing and waning, which controls the ebb and flow of tides and all earthly liquids. The crescent also speaks to passage and a state of becoming, and therefore of potential and, again, the magic word, here, promise. Cancer via its ruler Moon are all about natural laws and rhythms, which emerge as feminine in cosmic thought. Unlike Venus, the other feminine planet in astrology, which stands for the power of attraction and ironic passivity, the Moon actively receptive, as oxymoronic as that sounds (all signs having their own brand of paradox. As a cardinal sign, Cancer puts out, but what it puts out are feelers which are, by nature receptive. And this is what Cancerian people of all genders do to varying degrees and in different phases of their psycho-spiritual development. The world of emotion and intuition, both forms of feelers one can put out, are the domain of mother Moon.

Themis, herself, is a mysterious Titan goddess whose name literally means “to put in place.” She is the incarnation of the will of the gods, the divine law and order of things, and what must be put in place, in our human experience, to adhere to this mandate. All flood myths are hinged on humanity displeasing (the) god(s), after all; so it follows that those who (have been chosen to) survive are ones who will live in compact with this divine will. Themis knows the future—she created the Oracle at Delphi and was its first oracular diety. After the duplicity of Gemini, Themis separates fiction from fact, demanding open honesty, something even the ancient gods thought made the best policy. Themis is a Titanesss, belonging to a pantheon older than the Olympian gods, with Zeus/Jupiter as their king. Zeus’s Titan father Cronos/Saturn ruled the golden age when there was no vice of any kind and perfect bounty and humans remained youthful, living hundreds of years. Zeus was her only consort—and remember it was he who ordered the flood—and among their children are the Horae, meaning: the right moment, embodying the correctness of order unfolding in time. And Cancerian people do seem to ultimately flow with the go more than the rest of us, though they may perhaps at first, in early life, more than most of us to let go and float on the great, ever-unfolding. Cancerian typically experience a sense of being held hostage by their childhoods emerging with a sort of Stockholm syndrome brand of affection for their parents whos lifestyle tends to run counter to the Cancerian’s natural order of things.

Speaking of being rhythmically attued: The Moon of course rules Cancer and it represents the mother principle in astrology and myraid other esoteric disciplines. Mother is the source of life, deliverance and nurture; Cancer’s cosmic energy of cardinal-water (cardinal is initiatory and forward moving) echoing that gurgling fountain, spring, source of the rivers running to the sea. Likewise the Moon rules the tides, natural, ordered, ebb and flow, oe’r the estuaries of our existence, the same natural unfolding and right order that Themis and her progeny prescribe. And Cancer people are the most capable of sinking into those natural or cosmic rhythms, as they are one with the same, synching with the process of life and the expectation of its right unfolding. Where the mental sign of Gemini might employ the power of positive thinking or other such tricks as befits its clever and mischievous Mercury rule—manipulate, bargain, wheel and deal, if not pull a few fast ones—to ensure certain successes, Cancer people picture that farther shore, the culmination of goals and fulfillment, meanwhile digging in, in Crablike fashion, keeping their head down, letting time and tide take them to the next correct moment along their journey, content to let it be a cumulative one.

Ironically, as much as the Cancer digs downinto his tasks at hand, in the here and now, the rate at which a Cancerian’s outer circumstance changes, in the main for the better, tends to outstrip other sign’s trajectories. To boot, the Cancerian might do the exact same job for eons, their usual routine altering little for decades, success finding them in their own, often very private process of making their dreams come true, seemingly on their own terms. One might argue, the Cancerian themself, that it’s much the opposite—that they live life on life’s terms, taking what it gives them, day to day, making hay while the Sun shines, and lemonade out of any lemons. They rarely chase success, nor do they overthink or strategize—they plot a simple course and patiently tack their way, becoming a font and fairly verbal gusher, of wisdom, knowledge, creativity.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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