The sun moves into Cancer on or around on 21 June each year, where it will remain until around 22 July. After the dizzying search for truth ‘out there’ that is Gemini, we turn inwards. ‘A mammoth subjectivity animates this phase of the zodiac’, says Steven Forrest. To Cancer, ‘the fabric of the world… is feelings.’
The symbol for Cancer is the crab. The body of the crab is soft and squishy, defenceless. The crab must grow a shell to protect himself. ‘He must grow a wall between himself and nature’, Forrest says. ‘He is too delicate to protect himself otherwise.’
But we must not become confused by the metaphor of the crab’s shell. The lesson of Cancer is not about retreat, or walling oneself up inside a self-constructed citadel. ‘With this armour, the Crab endures,’ says Forrest. ‘But that success holds the seed of a perilous transformation. The Crab eats. He matures. And soon he outgrows his shell.’
Cancer is the fourth sign of the zodiac, and the first Water sign (following on from Aries – Fire, Taurus – Earth, and Gemini – Air). The Water element is expressed relatively straightforwardly through Cancer. Water speaks of nurturing and protection. About warmth and sensitivity. Most of all, Water teaches us to feel. ‘To feel consciousness, ‘ says Forrest. ‘To feel every nuance of life. To shed the shell of numbness that arms us against this slaughterhouse of a world.’
Cancer, then, has a lot to teach us. ‘To shed the shell of numbness that arms us against this slaughterhouse of a world.‘ You know how, every now and then, you hear something that cuts right to the heart of the issue? That speaks to how you feel, yourself, in your innermost heart? This is how this sentence struck me when I first read it. This is why it has stuck in my mind ever since.
For so many years I have travelled in this bubble of numbness, seeing it as my only protection against the horrors I see every day. I do not use this word casually, just as Forrest did not select ’slaughterhouse’ at random. You need only look around you to see. Jewel says it like this: ‘There are nightmares on the sidewalk. There are jokes on TV. There are people selling thoughtlessness with such casualty.’
How do we cope? How do we learn from Cancer – and not wall ourselves up inside a shell?
Forrest says that Cancer’s strategy is ‘to create the minimal defences consistent with survival‘ (emphasis his). Not an easy task, and certainly not one I pretend to fully understand. In this Cancerean month, though, I’m going to try.
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