A Cancer Full Moon in the River Reeds
Parsing the last full moon of the decade through poetry, film and mythos.
“Mermaid”, by Harold Oskar Sohlberg (1896)
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“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
- Marcel Proust
A word that keeps rising to my lips for this Full Moon is that of surrender. Every day now I walk Mark’s frozen banks, and the bells of that insistent water returning to source, under the thick spandrels of ice, is a prayer in another language. There’s something to lean times plunging us back into the sluices of the heart, and these last days of 2020 offer a chance to soothe and be soothed.
The last full Moon of the decade sees our sylvan luminary returned to her abalone throne, free at last from Saturn’s appraising gaze. This is a threshold moment: our Cancerian lunations now become empty lacuna—tide pools fertile with imaginative possibility. There’s a nostalgic current to this full moon, but also a growing Uranian riptide: we may find a radical reframe today in themes of gentleness, heart-centered progress, vulnerability, and the persistence of softness (even in 2020).
Cancer native, Marcel Proust, also said that “my destination is no longer a place, but a new way of seeing,” and this full moon asks us to ponder the radical upheavals that our year of plague has brought to our psychic sense of home. I’ve started to think that home in 2021 is everywhere in the world with a wifi signal, as I intend to go full-time as a roaming mystic-bard after vaccination.
With Venus on the South Node however, we might need to differentiate between patterns of nurturing that are healthy and sustainable, and those which only offer quick fixes. “Fuck it, nothing matters in the pandy” is a comforting and understandable refrain, but 2021 offers periods of calculated growth, between the contractions, and we will want to be ready to hit the ground running.
To this end, the last solar eclipse demanded a sacrificial libation before the seeding of new ventures. We might see something of a culmination now in that letting go. As a Gemini rising who likes to do things in twos, I offered booze and triggering phone calls with my ex to the sinkhole of Ketu. My Cancer Moon’s emotional ups and downs are now manageable rollers, instead of stormy chop, and though the days are unbelievably long, my productivity has increased tenfold.
Therefore this Cancer full moon offers a coda for 2020 that’s tender, and melancholic but also attuned to a bend in our cosmic river. Mars is soon to enter the fecund loam of Taurus, after an exceedingly long spell roving the salt-plains of Aries—endlessly spoiling for a fight. In the early summer of 2021, Jupiter will ingress into Pisces for a handful of blessed weeks, enfolding us in the saltwater waves of absolution. We are still deep in a season of sharp birthing contractions, but finally our dowsing rods are pointing us back to the waters of source.
Looking back to the lunar eclipse of January 2020, which ushered in our year of plague and constant sorrow, we saw our intrepid crab facing down the kraken of the Capricorn stellium, her crab claws snapping like castanets. This David and Goliath moment rings even more poignantly in retrospect, as the atomization and alienation of Late Capitalism climaxed under Covid 19, and we learned what a year of no hugs does to the human soul. Many of us also rose to this grim occasion, and may soon be emerging from our cocoons with splendid moth wings ungluing themselves from our sides.
This full moon is decidedly softer than January’s standoff with the Capricorn boneyard. We see the Moon dancing with the auspicious star of Alhena, bestowing riches, good health, honor, pleasure, society, and domestic benefits.[1] La Luna is also in a productive sextile to Uranus, which bodes well for the first wave of vaccination, and helps us to project beyond the trauma of 2020.
Most importantly, for the first time since 2017, we have a lush full moon in her domicile of Cancer that can be enjoyed without the Saturn co-presence, or the volatile fate-spinning of the nodes. Perhaps the simple fact of vaccines on the horizon makes the procedural squelching of hugs somehow easier to bear. Enjoy this oasis before things get spicy again in January!
Title unknown, by Harald Sohlberg
We are also now past the dazzling event horizon of the Great Conjunction, whose deep and alien gong will reverberate for the next 200 years. A conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn demarcates periods of two decades; this particular conjunction, however, has shifted the summits of Jupiter and Saturn into air signs for the next two centuries! We will be living the transition from earthy material hierarchy to the airy, leaderless rhizome, but new ages seldom dawn without considerable volatility.
The intensity of this quantum leap, into a new age of ideas, utopia, and likely social unrest, was reflected by the conjunction perfecting on the hinge of the solstice, at zero degrees of the sign of Aquarius. The fixed signs will now be shouldering the burden of future contractions and electrical storms. Nevertheless, it’s been a hell of a year for anyone with Big Cardinal Energy: Cancer, Capricorn, Aries and Libra probably feel like that meme of D.W. with wild, bloodshot eyes, and might use this full moon for a round of visceral howling. My Cancer stellium commiserates (maybe we need a support group).
The full moon ripens in the decan of Cancer that Austin Coppock associates with rivers, and which is ruled by the flow states of the Moon, and the heart meld of Venus: “According to the Javanajataka, in this first face of Cancer we witness A woman whose words are beautiful and full of grace. Holding a lotus in her hand, she stands in the water. She offers a lotus, the fruit of the flood, a plant whose clean geometry and color emerge from stagnant mud…This maiden, this goddess, stands at the point where the river divides. One stream flows north, carrying what we wash in it back to the source, back to the fertile womb of non-being. It is a place of cleansing and of letting go. The other branch cascades towards the future…”[2]
“Mermaid”, by Harold Oskar Sohlberg
The forking river perfectly describes the simultaneous undertow of nostalgia (described by Venus and Neptune entangled with the nodes), and the gathering current of passage into the unknown with the sextile to Uranus. Uranus in Taurus makes me think that cash apps, PayPal, and the rumblings of a UBI will be part of this heart-centered revolution.
Coppock’s primordial river, and the mysterious goddess who haunts this decan with her proffered lotus, reminds me of Alice Oswald’s long poem “Dunt: A Poem for a Dried Up River.” The poem was inspired by Oswald’s viewing of a figurine of Roman water nymph in a museum: “"I admire these extreme ways of invoking rain, just as I admire anyone who dares, by means of metaphor (and all language is rooted in metaphor), to communicate with something that isn’t human.”[3]
Oswald sees in the nymph an avatar of absence and liminality, as the Romans assigned the designation ‘nymph’ to any creature they didn’t understand. The dried up river also describes this past year’s surfeit of desiccated, Capricornian forms dragged into the underworld by Pluto, and further picked to the bone by the south node. Here’s a short excerpt from this hypotonic poem I encourage you to read in full, preferably aloud (please note that I’m also learning how to properly format poetry on this platform):
“…very small and damaged and quite dry / a Roman water nymph made of bone /she pleads she pleads a river out of limestone / little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried-up river /not really moving through the fields, / having had the gleam taken out of it /to the point where it resembles twilight. / little grumbling shivering last-ditch attempt at a river /more nettles than water / try again…”[4]
I’ve always found “Dunt” to have a strangely stilted, breathless and alien quality. Its insistent refrain, “try again”, pushes the speaker into increasingly knotted and self-consciously virtuosic uses of language and metaphor. The poem seems to wonder if the sheer linguistic exertion of fiercely metered language, and repetition, could invoke the water that haunts this dried river bed. Nevertheless, the poem’s recycling and reconfiguring of its own poetic resources, starts to give it an uncanny, even algorithmic quality. Perhaps this is where the Moon’s sextile to Uranus comes in.
The first decan of Cancer also brings to mind one of my favorite films, “The Night of the Hunter,” with its serial killer priest stalking two young children through the verdant countryside along the Ohio River. Despite sinister themes of Cancer’s childhood idyll violated by waves of revolution, and rising religious zeal, the film has a lyrical and dreamlike quality.
The iconic lullaby sequence sees the camera positioned from the banks of the river, so that moonlit toads, a glistening spider’s web, and midge-swarmed bulrushes, dominate the frame. The film’s director, Charles Laughton is a Cancer himself, and he often subordinates narrative progress, and human drama, to this lively bowery of river creatures, and lunar, life-giving rhythms.
In my favorite painting of the myth of Icarus, Bruegel leaves the mythological figure as an afterthought, foregrounding the liveliness of a bucolic scene, as if individual hubris is still no match for quantum waves of those lunar, life-giving rhythms.
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”, by Pieter Bruegel
Cancer’s archetype is tied in with the cocoons, tide pools, nests and hermetically-sealed ecosystems that support the germination, and cultivation, of even the most fragile life forms. Jupiter’s exaltation in Cancer sees the crab as the ideal holding vessel for the proliferation of Jupiterian expansion.
Indeed, there is medicine in Cancer’s deep knowing that life and the natural world trundles on, even amidst the most violent of societal contractions. The decan’s lotus is a reminder too of the fierce and exquisite beauty that can emerge from the humility of mud, and even the most abject of circumstances. There’s a reason why the most scintillating, and champagne-light screwball comedies flourished in the thirties, during The Great Depression, and I foresee a glittery cultural renaissance in 2021.
Except there’s another trickier piece to this full moon, which continues the story of our past solar eclipse, and may need to be cleared before we take advantage of that orienteering sextile to Uranus. As mentioned earlier, Venus is now occupying the South Node, and squaring Neptune. The South Node tends to have a Saturnian severing quality, but the SN ruler is now free of its Capricornian dungeon and in much better shape in Aquarius. Venus longs for this airy freedom too.
Still, this signature speaks of romantic separation (perhaps Covid-induced), and a dragging melancholy. With the square to Neptune, this longing may be falsely premised: perhaps we settle for a relationship that offers a familiar port of call in these strange times, glossing over the actual toxicity of the dynamic. With the South Node in play, we may need to slough away an attachment that offers some measure of comfort, but is not supportive of our soul’s growth and expansion.
The two tarot cards I drew for this full moon (the Two of Cups, and the Eight of Cups—a nice chime with the 8th degree of Cancer) further support the need to walk away from an entropic entanglement, even if venturing into the unknown, in the peak of plague, feels daunting. The Eight of Cups speaks of a pleasure that has curdled and stagnated, much like that bone-dry river bed. The cloaked figure has turned his back on the cups of pleasure, following the fallow river bed to some distant ocean (perhaps the future bounty of Jupiter in Pisces).
The Two of Cups is also the tarot card that rules the first decan of Cancer, and speaks of the longing for blissful soul union. However, we may have to be brutally honest with ourselves, Sag style, when it comes to our sacred alliances in this era of considerable volatility, migration, and chaotic flux. Will our partner walk 2021’s wryd path with us, or merely drag us down?
Perhaps we need to rupture the womb of a codependent, and stagnant relationship to invite truly expansive, soul-nourishing love into our lives. The Sabian symbol for Sagittarius 18 shows “children playing on the beach, their heads protected by sunbonnets”—a tender scene. However, we may need to consider when the protection of Cancer’s idyll begins to stifle our expansion. A relationship that made sense during the restriction of Covid may not cut it as the world awakens, slowly, from its slumber in 2021. How can we cultivate that sense of home within ourselves? What does nurturing look like without a beloved?
Finally, there’s something of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the South Node’s over the shoulder look. The full Moon is said to translate the light of the Sun, and Orpheus only loses his beloved when he glances back from the threshold of the worlds of the living and the dead. He cannot delight in this breaking of the sun, and their emancipation, on its own terms—but must filter this peak experience through the face of his lover. In that instant, however, she pulls the old Neptunian dissolve as per Hades’ contract, and vanishes forever into a plume of salt.
“DanteBea” by Harold Sohlberg
What would happen if we sat with the complexity of these profound cosmic shifts, without needing to externalize and reflect them through the ‘other’? What wisdom can we glean by going inward, and clearing space for spirit? What magic happens when I surrender to the liturgy of walks alone by Mark, offering my soul’s dialectic to his chambered, though lively ice?
Interestingly, it was the more macabre end of the life of Orpheus that came to me in dream-time, during the eclipse portal. Somehow, I was Lana Del Rey (Cancer queen!) shooting her latest music video, which involved a long, dolly shot of Lana skipping along a rushing river, and crooning to a decapitated head floating downstream. My dream was a sort of reversal of the myth of Oprheus’ gruesome end, whereby his Maenad-severed head continues to sing down the river, all the way to Lesbos. Perhaps, in this alternate reality, Eurydice never waited for Orpheus to turn: she chose another path out of the underworld, on her own terms. She emerged triumphant, and singing.
“Nymphs Finding the Severed Head of Orpheus”, by John William Waterhouse
I will end these full moon ruminations on some lines from another Alice Oswald poem, “Severed Head Floating Downriver:”
“and there where the ferns hang over the dark /and the midges move between mirrors /some woman has left her shoes / two crumpled mouths / which my voice searches in and out // my voice being water / which holds me together and also carries me away / until the facts forget themselves gradually like a contrail.”[5]
[1] https://www.constellationsofwords.com/stars/Alhena.html
[2] https://austincoppock.com/astrology-june-21st-30th-river/
[3] https://www.janesheldonsoprano.com/compositions/2020/3/29/poem-for-a-dried-up-river
[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90863/dunt-a-poem-for-a-dried-up-river
[5] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90862/severed-head-floating-downriver