Fourth: Cancer

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read the article explaining how the zodiac may be seen as a collection of twelve psychological types and thus gain context.

The first solstice of the year marks the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere, when the day is longest and, conversely, the night is shortest. The Day Force has triumphed and immediately begins to shrink against the ascending power of the Night Force, as indicated in the symbol’s caption. The summer brings out the fruit of the Day Force expansion: a mature individuality. It is now necessary to limit the expansion to focus the formation and growth of such individuality.

The sign of Cancer represents the focusing of the vital and formative energies in order to create the clearest image or impression possible. Therefore, it carries a contrary and opposing trend to the living expansion experienced through the multiple relationships begun under Gemini. Just as Taurus polarized the energy of Aries, Cancer will direct the energies of Gemini. Taurus and Cancer are traditionally considered “feminine” signs which complement their preceding “masculine” counterparts. I have written elsewhere that in reality each masculine–feminine pair constitutes an operative coupling in time: two zodiacal signs where the first represents the root symbol of the coupling and the second its confirmation symbol.

Gemini as Root Symbol

Gemini extends its quest for new relationships across the entire world of life experiences. Even though it relies mostly on the use of words, phrases or intellectual systems, the search is peculiarly absent of real interest in the ultimate results. The Gemini person seeks to obtain personal security from an interminable number of different contacts. He searches for a temporary intellectual control through verbal constructs. Although he is constantly expanding, he does so within the same known structures. That is why the Gemini individual will never abandon the “glasses” through which he sees life, taking them everywhere and to every occasion. He can’t care less if someone else doesn’t use the same glasses; having been the first one with such excellent glasses allows him to establish many more contacts that are useful to him.

For instance, in terms of love, Gemini tries to define himself by his attitude towards the opposite sex, avoiding the shock of seeing himself beaten by a love that is elementary in nature. He will tend to classify his reactions and the “type” of women he likes, while being eager for new horizons, due to curiosity and a desire for love. If he approves of being called a “Don Juan” it is only because such reputation may “expand” the terrain for new conquests. The Gemini person may be completely tied to his categories, his logic and his hopes but in a strictly personal way. He will never insist that others share his mental models, which may make him a tolerant person, albeit unable to share someone else’s point of view. He is a tolerant but intransigent person, whereas a Sagittarian individual (polar opposite of Gemini) may be understanding while at the same time highly intolerant. Sagittarius may sympathize with how a social situation may engender some attitudes in an individual and will not fault him for that. However, if he doesn’t approve of a situation or attitude, the Sagittarian will act with extreme intolerance with regards to the implied ideas, even as he may understand and even sympathize with the person holding such ideas.

Cancer as Confirmation Symbol

All of that comes to a screeching halt in Cancer, where we witness the sudden annihilation of the ardent expansion of Gemini, just as the sun stops suddenly the northern trek of its sunsets—recall that the word, solstice, comes from the Latin solstitium: stationary sun. A limit has been reached and the sunsets begin to head south, the curiosity for new relationships is absorbed by the change of polarity implied in the change of direction. The Day Force has reached maximum intensity and must be replaced by the matriarchal power of the Night Force. Where expansion has succeeded, definite limits must be imposed. If the expansion must continue, it will be under a new form of activity, in agreement with a social and mental basis, rather than a psychological and personal one.

What really happened to cause this inversion? That the self, unable to resist the pressures exerted by universal life forces, had to face the universe and, in particular, society. Such facing could generate openness in a free and individual manner, and indeed that happens to those who have reached a level of personality integration and liberty free from the causes for frustration and repression imposed by their parents, their racial past and even prior lifetimes; causes that have accumulated over the years. However, those memories, frustrations and failures are too strong for the ordinary man of today. The subconscious fears emerged in Aries, the biological and racial inertia and the sense of possession in Taurus, and the intellectually crystalized formulations in Gemini. So, in Cancer, a person is confronted with the inversion that calls for a social component in his life, requiring him to participate in society to affirm his maturity, which is really disturbing. All kinds of biological, emotional and even devotional forces surge from the unconscious and pierce the conscious mind.

Weddings and Initiations

All of these energies surging from the unconscious require that persons seek protection and a way to “channel” them. This is the reason of the wedding as a social ritual or of the occult Initiation. One spouse or one Initiator, because men lacks enough integrating force to make life itself a perennial Partner or Initiator. The innumerable life confrontations are constantly pulling to one side or another, threatening to break whatever integration (individuality) the personality may have. If man were conscious enough to always be universal life’s central point, there would not be a need for a wife or children to make him understand his life responsibilities.

The wedding and the home are conditioned by the “human” factor of “society” in response to the education received, and the frustrations imposed, by mostly the parents on a child. The normal development in childhood and adolescence keeps the youth in the Day Force, making them desirous of constant growing and, in the Gemini phase, of constant expansion. One should be open to the development of the Night Force by exercising our free and conscious will. This is what the Cancer solstice teaches us. There must be a re-polarization, though nowadays humanity has to be forced to re-polarize. It has to be forced to open itself to the Night Force which impulses the relatedness in mankind and ushers men to establish meaningful relationships with one another. That humanity is unable to open itself to establish a meaningful world fraternity is one of the biggest problems of our times.

Individualism and Collectivism

The relative value of the individual versus the collective has spawn numerous revolutions and wars in history. This is because, even though the question is answered compulsively in plants and animals, human beings find in themselves the god-like capacity to formulate and try out a variety of solutions. They can decide to a large extent the relative intensity of the trends toward individualism and toward collectivism, although not to as large an extent as many assume. They can can decide how great a value they will give to the rights of the individual and how deep their subservience will be to the dictates of society and the State. As Rudhyar emphasized, this possibility carries with it a great and tragic responsibility.

Given that the merits of collectivism are often discussed in economic or political terms, many people believe the struggle only appears in those fields. But all of life is a basic conflict between the forces which seek to isolate a number of different elements and integrate them into a fairly unique and independent organism, and the forces which attempt to break the isolation of the individual entity and turn it into one of many units subservient to the rhythms and purpose of a vaster whole. The basic life-conflict between “individual” and “society” has been identified by modern psychologists who seek to transform it into a harmonious marriage, or at least a workable compromise. In our holistic approach to the zodiac, the trend toward individualization is impulsed by the Day Force whereas the Night Force impulses the pull toward collectivization effected by the individual’s relatedness. Each of the twelve phases, the signs, is viewed as a blend of these two forces.

The struggle, however, gives meaning to the periodic sequence of the seasons and to the yearly cycle of vegetation. Spring is the time when life seeks to become expressed in particular organisms as different from one another as the stage of evolution allows, each plant shows a different hue of green, each flower a different color and scent. The summer solstice, which marks the beginning of Cancer, represents the apex of such striving for differentiation. By comparison, autumn is the season when the individual characteristics fade away with the fall of the leaves, and when what is not absorbed by the soil and the snow concentrates in the seed, completely dedicated to the preservation of the collectivity.

Spring Signs and Cancer

Taking the zodiac signs as psychological types, the spring symbols identify types that desire to reach the status of an individual, each in its own way. Generically, they seek to achieve the fullest differentiation from the average, seeking to attain a condition of personal integration and individualized selfhood. Writes Rudhyar: “The Aries type seeks this goal by personalizing the power of new creative impulses or ideas; the Taurus type, by bringing up human substance and human energies to a state of maximum responsiveness to the fecundant spirit of ‘Man’ or God. The Gemini type seeks personal integration through an increase of mental awareness and an ambitious striving for new values and a new sense of relationship”. As mentioned earlier, at the summer solstice we have a dramatic change; the sun “stands still” and reverses its motion in declination, and the sunsets begin to occur farther to the south. It is the time when integration on an individualist and exclusivist basis has reached its maximum expression.

The Cancer type of human person presents two contrasting modes of operation. On one hand, he expresses the purest or most “rugged” form of individualism, including the greatest kind of insularity and isolation; the crab retreating backwards to its cave. On the other, he presents a peculiar sense of fear and resentment caused by the inescapable realization that the tide has turned and that society and its collective power will win eventually over the individual. Rudhyar again: “The Cancer person is most consciously individualized, yet most fearful subconsciously of the unavoidable pressure of the demands which life, society, humanity as a whole, and ultimately God, must and will make”.

The most concrete expression of those demands is the child, and the home made necessary by such child. A pregnant woman has given up her hard won individuality of consciousness and her physical structure. A man who becomes a provider for a home is caught in the wheels of social duties and respectability. Life has won over the mother, society over the head of the family; and there is no turning back, at least for a long while. Somewhat paradoxically, this victory of collective life and society over the individual also brings these individuals to personal fulfillment. This fact, Rudhyar emphasized, is the solution to the riddle Cancer presents to himself and others.

Dark Side

Cancer is the symbol of personal, private integration. It represents the will to establish the basis for an individual consciousness on a set of values clearly defined in verbal formulations and exclusive of others. A will to establish a clear but narrow focus for his individuality to operate which, again, is exemplified by a child or a home—my child, my home. Yet, what is unique about most children and most homes? Are they not the triumph of collective patterns and traditions over the individualistic dreams of youth? Do they not often betray the subconscious, yet potent, resentment of the individual against social normalcy? A resentment that will turn against the children in subtle, possessive ways or flare up in later years as emotional conflagrations of an unsocial and in some cases abnormal nature.

The intricate nature of the Night Force is too weak but at times pierces the conscious mind of Cancer in unpredictable ways. In the extremes, the sign has been traditionally considered to harbor lunatics or psychics, depending on how the subconscious energies manifest consciously. The unknown but strongly-felt power of the collective over the individual may fuel such fear that the Cancer person clings stubbornly to his individualism, his old standards and his personal possessions. He holds on tenaciously with crablike claws (symbols of Cancer) to his achievements, in fear of not knowing his own position in the world.

Gift: Knowing Where One Belongs

The fear of losing himself into a vast collective entity must be transformed into the realization of the place he occupies in the collective. Once he feels that he belongs in the vast organism of society or of humanity as a whole, even his most unconscious fears and resentments will disappear. This, indeed, is the Gift of the Spirit for the Cancer type: Knowing where one belongs. This cannot be a mere case of intellectual “brain knowledge” but a knowing in the roots of being, in the depths of feeling as well as in the heights of spiritual intuition. This is not about the actual business of participating in the activities of the group, community or nation; such experience of active participation will come later, even though it is implied in the Spirit’s Gift to Cancer. What the individual needs at this stage is to feel through and through that he belongs, and to realize that he has a definite place and function, which is clearly his own, in society and in the life of whatever group is claiming him.

The vague forebodings of losing oneself into a collective immensity can only be appeased if this type of person can find anchorage in a clearly defined situation, function or locality which he can picture to himself. Thus, the Cancer type will have to develop the ability to make pictures, and to see pictures—the foundation for the psychic gifts often found in Cancer personalities. Rudhyar: “Confronted with a new situation, they learn to visualize its meaning as a symbolic picture; which is what most types of clairvoyance or psychism are”. The symbol shows where the situation “belongs” and where one “belongs” in it. The symbol pictured is a gift of the Spirit, and island of meaning in the vast unknown ocean of collective, universal life. The home, moral respectability, a work schedule, even a clock to tell the exact time, all give a reference, a “You are here” sign for human travelers who see their feeble individualities caught into the tide of vast open spaces without boundaries and without names.

The upsurging tide of the collective must be met by the individual such that it means the promise of his entrance into a state of enduring participation in ever vaster wholes of being. Townsmen knowing there is a place for them in the metropolis and citizens of a nation knowing there is a function for their natural existence in the great global organism of Humanity. There would be no need to fear. There is never any need to fear, or be in want. Spirit is that which always answers with abundance and plenitude the empty heart and the bare hands lifted up to the stars. All we need to do is to lift up our hearts and our hands to the stars, for Spirit always responds to those who never set limits to their fulfillment or stop in fear of the receding tide. Spirit is that which moves from crest to crest while filling the deepest abysses.

Coda

Let me end with a paragraph from Rudhyar’s book Gifts of the Spirit: “The sun ‘stands still’ in the solstitial hour; but man does not need to stand still. It is man’s eternal destiny to move through all crests and all depths, to move with the rhythm and the creative power of spirit. Man is spirit. As spirit, man goes on, ever on. His path is glorious; for it is God’s path made clear with consciousness, made fragrant with the scent of noble deeds”.

Always Love. 🌹🙏💖