Cancer Sign

Mythology

According to Eratosthenes, Hera placed the Cancer constellation in the sky while Hercules, with all the animals by his side, fought a Hydra. Only the crab rose from the lake, completely hopeless against the giant, and pinched Hercules’ leg. Hercules, in his rage, crushed the crab under his foot. Hera placed the Cancer constellation in the sky as one of the 12 signs. In Greek mythology, Selene is the goddess of the moon, home of the Titans Hyperion and Theia. In Roman mythology, her name is Luna. Later, Selene was replaced by Artemis, and Luna by Diana. Another lunar figure included by the Greeks alongside Artemis and Selene is Hecate, and so they form a triangle of the moon’s states: Artemis is the half-moon, Selene is the full-moon, and Hecate is the new-moon. In post-renaissance artwork Selene is described as a pale, beautiful woman, holding a torch, wearing a crescent-shaped ornament on her head, riding a chariot. The Roman goddess of the moon is Luna, and a temple for her was built on Aventine Hill in the 6th Century BC. Hecate is an interesting character, who was the goddess of the Amazonas, turned into the goddess of the Underworld. Her name was coined by Pharaohs, deriving it from the name of the Egyptian goddess, Heqet. She assists the birth of the sun in the east every day, and so Hecate receives qualities of fertility, birth and pregnancy (also qualities of the moon and Cancer on an astrological map). Greeks called her “Hecate Antea” which means “Hecate Deliverer of Dreams”, as they believed she was in charge of dreams, nightmares and insanity. Hecate, queen of the night is a beautiful goddess: Silver feet, hair of snakes that turn any observer into stone, necklace of testicles and holding an umbilical cord. It seems they are all relics for her worship as a goddess of birth in Egypt (From “The carmit’s boiling cauldron, Hecate’s personality and origin 2003 internet page). She holds in her hand a torch to light the night, a key to the mysteries of the boundaries, prophecy and witchery, and a sword that cuts illusions.

Maternity, early childhood, Appearance and Reflection

Cancer is the astrological representative of infancy and early childhood, especially the oral period of the first one or two years of life, at the end of which we are torn from the padded, relatively comfortable and merciful existence into the world of “out there”. It’s hard not to address the relation between a woman’s lunar Cancer menstrual cycles (28-29 days) as progressing in match with the moon’s cycle. In the historical past these cycles were perpetuated in lunar ceremonies and myths. Because of the fixed cycles in the lunar-feminine-maternal dimension, it has turned into one of the laws of nature. The sign’s keywords: Mother, womb, breasts, memory, history, eyes, feeding, breastfeeding, home, sugar, family, photography, appearance, past, moon, patriotism, legacy. Cancer is the archetype of the past and the memory; therefore it is a key component in our personal identity. Our memory preserves the chronological timeline that shows up in the polar Capricorn. Cancer and Capricorn involve each other in an inseparable two-way flow of spiritual energy. Time (Chronos – Capricorn) builds in our subconscious memory, memory reaffirms the aspect of time and it is hard to separate the two. The English philosopher John Locke claimed: “Memory is the key to personal identity more than anything else – the fact I carry in me the awareness of my outcomes is what makes me what I am”. Identity is actually memory of continuity, time and belonging. In the Cancer sign lies the psychological-intuitive recognition that time has a powerful grasp of the soul, not something that passes and gets forgotten… The events of early childhood are engraved deep in the soul of the individual and continue to generate mental load even in the years beyond. Moreover, as years go by, the memories might receive a hurtful and difficult interpretation as one understands and is aware exactly why the events happened and the familial or other circumstances. A three, four or five year old kid, is not yet aware enough of linear time, and their experiences, especially during contact with their mother or the lack there, sink into a sort of black hole devoid of time and conscience. This black hole is a type of eternality in the soul. Energy exists in the form of one memory or another, so that the event is unknown to us, or we are unaware of it, making it eternal, inaccessible and powerful. The lack of a treatment or solution causes it to be eternal. This type of astrological viewing reaffirms the psychoanalytic claim of Melanie Klein and Oralists from the 30’s, which state that blame – polar Capricorn – is transferred by the mother to the breastfeeding baby (therefore supporting and reaffirming the polar aspect and tension that exists in signs) even in the early oral stage accompanied with incest sexual feelings toward her child. Feelings of this type hold a sexual energy that is transmitted to the child and picked up by them. The compensation of the polar Capricorn’s stubbornness to the cancer won’t be late to show, as the oedipal process occurs as a step in the oral Cancer development. Melanie Klein was determined in Cancer Capricorn fashion that the Capricorn superego, meaning conscience and guilt, created from oedipal tendencies, as a result of Cancer frustration a child feels when weaning. These show at the end of the first year and at the beginning of the second year of the child’s life. The deprivation created when the Cancer breast is abstained from the baby or depleted, during that dawn of life, form beginnings of feelings of entrapment and restriction, a sort of polar Capricorn shrinkage. This is how we lost our good old mother in “Alabama Song”. This dialectic between the signs Cancer and Capricorn is intrinsic and prime, which is the reason it is so powerful. Our lives begin in a dimension of dim Cancer memory or even lack of any memory. It is truly a type of paradoxical polarity between attraction and repulsion, commitment and taboo, mercy and comfort against disconnect and deprivation. These are the deep conflicts in our souls in the Capricorn-Cancer aspect. In this point of view, the Cancer past is a dynamic experience, renewing events or other kinds of states, at any point, as normal life continues on; activating the Cancer’s representation conserved in our souls (the factors of the Zodiac cycle are a type of conserving representatives). In Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities” (1972), Marco Polo discusses with the Mongolian leader Kublai Khan (1216-1294), about how the past clarifies the present and the future. Marco Polo intuitively senses the polar cycle of the Cancer-Capricorn as a mental pendulum. If memory has the property of passion and yearning, it becomes a powerful present. According to Polo, we venture forward to relieve our past, even if we don’t understand or know it. The venture forward is a venture backwards into our personal Cancer past. Cancer-Capricorn is an inseparable entanglement of past-present-future. In Marco Polo’s case, his travels in cities hidden from the eye are intended to understand Venice and the meaning of his life. It is a journey through memory. As for the figure of the mother, a baby’s first self-image is constructed from the mother’s face and the way she looks at the baby. In actuality the aspect of appearance, associated astrologically with the moon, is at play here. The mother’s facial expressions, expressing calm or disrupt, happiness or anger, teach the baby to identify his feelings, reflecting in the face of the mother in lunar-reflective fashion. The mother’s face sculpts the baby’s personality as he sees her and itself as one entity. According to psychoanalytic theory, Cancer is seen in the mother’s figure as a first mirror. This lunar Cancer mirror builds the foundation of comparison in a joint creation between the mother and the baby, much like paintings in the beginning of the renaissance era, describing Mary and Jesus looking into each other’s eyes. The famous painter Rembrandt (15.7.1606) is a Cancer that expressed the polar Capricorn in his artworks. Each of Rembrandt’s paintings involve figures and events from the Bible or the New Testament (The religious aspect relating astrologically with Capricorn) such as Petrus in the prisoner’s chamber, Philistines gouging out Samson’s eyes, Bat Sheva taking a bath on the rooftop and the stoning of Saint Stephen. Cancer is the dream of returning home. The root of the word ‘nostalgia’ is in the Greek words: “Nostus” – return, and “Algus” – Suffering, meaning suffering that derives by an unfulfilled longing for home.

Cancer in in the movies

The director Federico Fellini (20.1.1920), a Capricorn, demonstrates in his movies the compensating Cancer and gives a polar Capricorn reaction to it. In the movie L’intervista (1987), Marcello Mastroianni and his friends visit the Swedish actor Anita Ekberg in her home in Rome. Anita, no longer young, meets them in a flailing dress and a face with no wrinkles. She returns piercing looks to the group inspecting her and examines how her character reflects in their memories. This is a Cancer encounter, where Capricorn time that passed, sort of with arrival and reflection, intensify by utilizing a flashback to cancer past. It is a famous scene from the movie “La Dolce Vita” (1960), where Eckberg and Mastroianni dance in a fountain. The camera focuses on their young beautiful faces… blond Anita in a strapless black dress, highlighting her large breasts, playing around in the fountain looking like the big woman from the dreams. In the flashback they are watching themselves after thirty years, as Cancer sadness looms over the nostalgic movie and comes across in the Scythe of Cronos, the scythe of diachronic Capricorn time. The fictional world of Cancer reacts to the original Capricorn of Fellini in a creative, mystical sense in his movie “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965), where imagination and illusion of Cancer take over Capricorn realism, when Juliet Masina – Fellini’s real life spouse – is presented as a rich and bored woman, indulged in the search for herself, and visiting Fortune tellers. Fellini was an expert in the portrayal of dreams and an inner Cancer fictional world, compensating for the harsh and realistic Capricorn. He tended to highlight Cancer breasts in his movies. In the movie “Amarcord” (1973), he detailed his childhood in the town of Rimini, and mentioned he loved to imagine and tell stories. “My whole life I dedicate to the large supermarkets of memory”, he once said about himself. Actor Tom Cruise (3.7.1962) is one of the most Cancer personalities, and in the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) the world of illusion and imagination of the Cancer combine. The eyes are a Cancer organ. Cruise and his spouse, then, Nicole Kidman make love in front of the mirror in their home. A mirror is an expression to the sign’s astrological aspect, a sort of reflection. A combination of past and patriotic legacy were portrayed in his movie “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), experiencing a journey to the collective Cancer American memory of the Vietnam War. In the movie “Minority Report” (2002), Cruise, as a police officer, is forced to replace his eyes in order to be able to pass the retina scan of the futuristic police institution. The eye motif is shown once again. Cancer memory turns up in the famous science fiction movie “Blade Runner” (1982), where the actor Harrison Ford, also Cancer (13.7.1942) creates identities for androids with implanted memories. And you can’t not mention actor Tom Hanks (9.7.1956) that expressed the inner patriotism of the sign (as country in the psychological sense is representative of a mother) in the movie “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). In this movie’s plot, his mission as an American Army officer is to find and return to his mother a lost soldier on the battlefront of the Second World War. And lastly, he is of course Bill Cosby (12.7.1937), famed from the American television show “Cosby Family”.

Cancer in Literature - Kafka, Orwell, Proust, Rousseau

The Cancer Novelist Franz Kafka (3.7.1883) did escape to the lands of Cancer imagination in his literary creations, but they expressed well the compensating polar Capricorn. His literary creations showcase the Cancer-Capricorn Pendulum of cold realism and fiction. In his novel “The Trial”, Josef K, the protagonist of the story, agrees to take part of a trial against him where the establishment prosecutes him, utilizing the Capricorn representative of judgmental Saturn – “All belongs to court”. He is then led to his own execution in the forest after an official and arbitrary sentence. In his novel “The Castle”, K. is unable to contact the castle, astrologically representing the polar Capricorn’s inflexibility, coldness and stubbornness, lacking mercy with regards to ‘divine providence’. “The Trial” and “The Castle” by Kafka discuss what he highlighted as “limitless sense of guilt”, clearly expressing the polar both-way path between Cancer and Capricorn. K. is arrested without having done any wrongdoing, his Capricorn guilt being taken for granted, so wills the authority. To live and to exist, is a crime. “The Castle” and Petrus’ gate in his novels are representations of human relations with the divine, its astrological representative being the Capricorn. Kafka the person is in a helpless maze of bureaucracy, burdening him with the metaphysical sense of blame by “existing in this world”, existing in time. George Orwell (25.6.1903), expresses in his famous book 1984 (1949) the ‘big Capricorn brother’, stationed at the top of the pyramid in a futuristic society. This big brother has Cancer eyes in every home, the Telescreen operating 24/7. Even the Cancer aspect of family falls apart as children snitch on their parents. The big brother rewrites Cancer history, Orwell is a Cancer aware of the fact that the present ruler controls the past and therefore can rewrite history, change the language, and change spiritual reality. Investigator O’Brien tortures Winston into believing the Capricorn political party’s truth. To understand, realize and believe that the party is reality, the party is everything. Nothing exists outside of it; everything lies in the Capricorn Saturn’s rings. This party is a new conscience doctrine where 2+2=5 and you are loving it. If you are not a member, you are out of time, out of history. Not believing in the big brother is lacking identity. Orwell dives deep into polar Capricorn’s totalitarianism. Similarly in his novel “Animal Farm” (1945) he highlights the Capricorn’s aspirations for power and sovereignty. In this context we can also talk about Nelson Mandela (17.7.1918) leader of the black people in South Africa, famous as a result of his long lasting struggle against the Capricorn Apartheid by the white people. Alike, the Dalai Lama is a Cancer (6.7.1935) that resists the Chinese dictatorship in Tibet without violence, meanwhile expressing the polar Capricorn through long lasting struggle. Marcel Proust (10.7.1871) – French Author Proust might be the most characteristic of all Cancer representatives. 3130 pages in seven covers bring him back to his childhood. The seven books were written in a room he has not left since the moment he began writing the Cancer artwork “In Search of Lost Time” (1913). The topic of the novel is Cancer memory, and living the polar Capricorn’s aspect of time in the deepest sense. In this novel, Proust relives the dawn of his life. He tastes the Madeleine cookies – shaped as a Cancer shell – dipped in tea poured by his mother. Polar Capricorn’s aspect of time shows up when Proust describes a clock’s pendulum, afterwards he immediately turns to a Cancer mirror mercilessly standing in the corner of the room. It is a polar observation on the flow of Cancer-Capricorn: Time, past, clock, and mirror are performing in scenes where Proust’s Cancer essence shows in his recognition that each moment holds within it the past and present. In the experience of life, they’re presented each on their own, while smell and taste linger on for longer… remembering, waiting, hoping… Lost time is Cancer creation, focused around the philosophy of time and memory. Proust sets two mirrors: One reflecting the world, and one reflecting conscience. These mirrors meet with the Madeleine cookie’s bite, bringing up the past from the soul’s depths. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28.6.1712) – The French Philosopher is a Cancer who in his famous article “The Social Contract” (1762) introduces the term “General Will” which can be interpreted as a compensatory response to Cancer. As a result of everybody depositing their personality to the general rule of General Will, Rousseau is certain that the state is emptying the individual’s personality from content. General Will turns into a type of “big brother” serving the authoritarian Capricorn. It is highlighted in the famous quote, taught in courses of political science, “One who does not abide by General Will be forced to by society. He is forced to be free”. It is a polar Capricorn, reacting to Rousseau’s Cancer, as this famous quote establishes a democratic dictatorship in the social contract. We see Cancer fiction with Rousseau in his book of a lone venturer, and Rousseau himself is considered a loner, a result of Cancer’s nature. Rousseau characterizes Cancer, as in the 18th century, her calls for the return of man to nature, as he believes urbanization destroys the ancient natural state where freedom and equality ruled. It is the longing for Cancer past.

Cancer in a collective sense: Muslim, American, and French

The authentic representative of the Cancer is the Muslim. The sign’s clear and apparent motifs are expressed in the aspects of family, memory, hosting, food, and the hookah. All clear characteristics of the Muslim world. Islamic time is based on the moon, the same moon displayed atop every mosque, from small towns to big cities. The Muslim family mostly contains a lot of children, and respect for the family is an important matter. Often, what is perceived as sin in the eyes of the Muslim, calls for an extreme reaction, so much so to even be murder, in the name of the “family’s respect”. Cancer is represented in the hosting, expressions, love for food and the Ramadan fasting, where the Muslim eats only during the night, for a month. In the lunar Cancer realm, time is slow and haste is regarded like a devil. The motif of vengeance, relives the past in full intensity, as if it happened only yesterday. One Thousand and One Nights is a picturesque expression of the Arabic Cancer world of fiction, the same fiction that funded “Voice of Cairo” during the six day war, claiming the Egyptian army has defeated the Israeli army. Cancer is expressed in the Arab’s preference of fat and round women. The fuller they are, the more valuable they are, as seen in the hefty bride price that will pay for them, a result of the lunar cycle. Everything relates to food: A luscious behind and breasts bring proper payments, and don’t dare to try to lose calories. Cancer eyes are the only thing seen beyond the veil. The mouth and lips are covered, the veil conservatively censors the woman’s body in polar Capricorn fashion, and hides it completely. The polar Capricorn, compensating for Cancer, is expressed in the phrase “Either… Or….” showing up in phrases such as “Either Islam or by blade”… and the belly dancer… is of course Cancer in its essence. Muslims are considered the forefront of optics and the study of the human eye throughout history. The United States of America is a Cancer ‘born’ on 4.7.1776. The aspect of family was experienced by the Americans with the Kennedys. The Kennedy family was the most world’s famous family in the 60s. Polar Capricorn’s destiny was seen with the murder of Kennedy in 1963. Another Cancer family emerged on TV, the Cosby family. American television is saturated with familial shows like “Dallas”, “All in the Family”, “Roseanne”, “Lee Sisters”, and “Melrose Place”. Another expression for the aspect of family is the importance of the First Lady. The president makes sure to be filmed with his family, glorifying his relationship. As Cancer relates to food, it is represented daylee in the burger, the USA being the ‘capital of beef’, McDonalds, the Hotdog, and Coca-Cola, all exported from America to the rest of the world. Don McLean sings “Bye, bye, Miss American pie”, New York is nicknamed “Big Apple”, and America is “Uncle Sam”. Even Popeye, the famous cartoon character, eats spinach to gain strength. The good life in America was once described by a famous Cancer, Ernest Hemingway, saying a Havana cigar in one hand and a Martini glass in the other is the meaning of a good life. In the Great Cancer America, the house should be spacious, with a dog on the lawn. Cancer is expressed in the American memory of historical events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the Second World War (pearl being the stone of Cancer), the Kennedy murder, the Vietnam War, and 9/11. The landing on the moon on the 20th of July, 1969, is a great expression of Cancer. The figure of a busty blonde saturates America. It is an archetypical Cancer figure, such as Dolly Parton, Pamela Anderson (1.7.1967), with her silicon breasts being made famous throughout the entire world thanks to the TV show “Baywatch”. Anderson of course is not the only one, being preceded by Jane Russel, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield. Oral Cancer tends to chew gum, both in theatre and reality. We can place the French in Cancer if we take the planned date of the fall of Bastille, as a crucial point in French history. The revolution took place in 14.7.1789, in the Cancer’s cycle. The orality expressed in restaurants and chefs, in the great French cuisine and the famous Baguette. History, Cancer, and past are seen in castles, churches and other ancient structures in the streets. Cancer breasts being revealed in famous city nightclubs such as Lido de Paris and Moulin Rouge.