Of Crabs, Chariots, and Scarab Beetles: Decoding the Cancerian Archetype
I unpack the sign of Cancer and its nuanced relationship with time through Cormac McCarthy, James Hillman, the Tarot, and the Thema Mundi. (Ruminations, as well, on Roe v Wade).
Since my Mexico roving, I’ve been revisiting Cormac McCarthy — the enigmatic American author whose work obsessed me through my undergrad (and is hitting differently now, this side of the USA’s Pluto Return). His prose is noted for its blurring of time and scale, with certain passages bordering on scripture or liturgy. Long, run-on sentences generate their own centrifugal force — a propulsion that seems yoked to the primordial threshing of strife and eros itself deep in the bellows of the earth. Strewn between passages of Old Testament violence and grandeur there are moments of brutal, flint-like declamation. Always, McCarthy returns to the fact of the natural world and its beautiful, luminous things:
“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
McCarthy is a Cancer, born at the dark of the moon. Revisiting his work has helped me further understand the Cancerian archetype — a sign whose complexity perhaps suffers the most under pop astrology. Cancer is beholden to an experience of time that is elastic, erotic — a miasma of everything all at once that one must swim through. McCarthy’s writing has a tendency to blur wide-angle moments with sharp visual details. No partitions exist between the present occasion of his prose and historical time, mythic time — even the precession of the vernal equinox on its ancient axle.
“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”
This nesting of the macro and microcosmal is crucial to understanding Cancer, a sign that experiences time as a whirlpool — comfy within the nested spheres and wheels the alchemists believed to constitute our reality. If Gemini is the time hacker — the psychopomp cheerfully slipping through loopholes in the space-time continuum — Cancer is the center that miraculously holds these timelines together. The crab wallows in the substance of time itself, gathering eddies of memory, the tides of emotions, and the alchemical mixing of the humors. So many of our great writers and poets are Cancers, as they pore over time’s complex marinade and translate its nuances.
The paradox of the Tarot’s Chariot, ruled by Cancer, speaks as well to its strangely dynamic non-motion: Symbolic Studies recently drew my attention to the “impossible chariot” of classical decks with wheels turned inward or even statues of creatures in front of the craft that would make forward motion impossible. The charioteer’s experience of movement is drawn inward — the flux of an emotional tempest that can be mastered. The sphinxes pulling in opposite directions nonetheless generate momentum as these oscillations are harmonized.
This sign presides, of course, over the solar climax of the summer solstice when the Sun reaches its zenith in the Northern Hemisphere. This is a time when Helios, and indeed time itself, seems to stand still. The hyperreal quality of the sunsets in Cancer season speak to this paradoxical liveliness and non-motion. There’s no sunset quite as baroque as a late June sunset, as the sky has ample time to layer its washes and pigments. Even the gilding of the canted sun flares for an eerie length of time.
I’ve been mesmerized by Kootenay Lake spangled in these leisurely sunsets. This dazzling surface level ornamentation is well captured by Cancerian Gustave Klimt whose decorative paintings are also charged with lunar flux and movement. Then the sky polishes itself down to a luminous silver and your experience of time starts to warp, bend — here we are initiated into the uncanny realm of the Moon: the luminary Cancer rules over. These endless dusks remind me of James Hillman’s meditations on the alchemical quality of silver:
“The cool, silver psyche, though seemingly “unrelated,” can establish relations between the most burning issues and hold them together, yet without fusing them into a false compromise (amalgam). It mediates, attaching molten factions by means of its own detachment.”
The elaborate scansion of the barn swallows in their evening feed, which I’ve been watching everyday from my porch, speaks to Hillman’s idea that silver needs to be tended to with a certain amount of vigor, as well as delicacy. Through the intricacy of their feeding patterns, the birds look as if they were brushing the dusk’s platinum with their wings:
“Silver requires polishing, attention, a bit of rubbing and fussing; it calls for worry.”
And yes, Cancer is a sign that worries. Just as the Sun is gathered, in the height of its splendor, it begins its descent into the Saturnian lead of winter. The crab lives and breathes the saudade of this loss:
“The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.” (Marcel Proust, Cancer Sun).
Manilius, writing in the 1st century AD, draws a likeness between the crab’s grasping nature and this enchanted solstice moment when the Sun lay suspended in the height of its sigmoid curve: “Shining at the hinge of the year by the blazing turning-point which when recalled the Sun rounds in his course on high, the Crab occupies a joint of heaven and bends back the length of day.”
Both Capricorn and Cancer share a melancholy that is born of their intimacy with the true medium of time — its bolts of cloth poured out and folding endlessly. Nothing ever really begins or ends but all is poised in a constant state of twinned emergence and entropy. Encoded by both the triumph of the longest day and the longest night, these signs betray a rueful “what now” at the pinnacle of achievement. This is when one feels the weight of time the most, in the after-ring of a monumental effort realized — the material world conquered, what is left but to fall inward through the ever-expanding rings of the psyche?
Or, to quote McCarthy once more:
“The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”
Both Cancer and Capricorn are the zodiac’s contemplatives, garden hermits — Billy Goat Gruffs presiding over gates and thresholds. The great Chinese haiku master, Basho, living alone amidst the karsts and carving his poems into moss — surely he was a Cancer. My poetry mentor, Cancerian Tim Lilburn, channeled his collection Moosewood Sandhills while burrowed into a slot he dug in the earth deep in the wilds of Saskatchewan:
“All knowing darkens as it builds.
The grass is a mirror that clouds as the bright look goes in.
You stay in the night, you squat in the hills in the cave of night. Wait.
Above, luminous rubble, torn webs of radio signals.
Below, stone scrapers, neck bone of a deer, salt beds.
The world is ending.”
The ancients saw the signs of Cancer and Capricorn, guarding the crucial hinges of the summer and winter solstices respectively, as containing the portals of the Sun where souls spill in a stream from sky to earth and earth to sky. Cancer presides over the Portal of Man and Capricorn, the Portal of Gods. Through the portal of man the soul roots itself into earthly matter, which in turn is sculpted by the rhythms of the Moon.
Like its opposite sign of Capricorn, the sea goat, the crab is poised between land and water — traveling between the lunar realm of the unconscious and the solstice’s climax of light, enlightenment, and Apollonian chiaroscuro. Other avatars for Cancer include the sea tortoise, the lobster and the crayfish — creatures whose roundness and protective outer shells recall the earth itself: it’s easy to forget that this crust of terrafirma, into which so many civilizations have been scratched and blown away, contains a secret inner life of roiling magma.
The Egyptians saw Cancer as a scarab beetle, another variation on the theme of creatures with iron-hard shells. They saw the scarab as symbolically pushing the Sun across the heavens — a creature they connected to immortality and the sacred mysteries of the life cycle itself. Cancer’s gathering inward of the resources it needs to cultivate life is echoed in the reproductive cycle of the scarab: the beetle rolls its own dung into a ball that functions as a holding chamber for the laying of its eggs. As the larvae hatch, they are immediately enfolded by the nutrients they need to survive and grow.
According to The Constellation of Words, the God associated with the scarab beetle, Khepera — the creator — draws its name from the verb “(k)hpr” expressing the idea of taking a place within the cyclical nature of the world and of existence. Ruled over by the celestial body most intimately entwined with the affairs of the Earth (the Moon), it is Cancer, more so than the earth signs, that is most closely aligned with Earth’s telos — its cyclical unspooling and breathing.
Perhaps this was one of the reasons Cancer was chosen as the rising sign for the Thema Mundi — a theoretical birth chart of the world that also functioned as a heuristic for teaching planetary rulership and the rationale behind exaltation. Cancer is considered the zodiac’s great nurturer, though I believe it goes deeper than this. Like the crab whose outer livery protects a rich inner softness, this archetype further suggests the hiddenness of the female sex and the mysterious gestation of new life itself within the womb’s private dark.
To this end, the cluster of stars that dominates the constellation of Cancer is one of the dimmest in the zodiac: called the beehive cluster, its inscrutability once again hints at processes that must unfold in darkness.
Perhaps Cancer’s earthiness has a more metaphysical, or even etheric dimension — its lunar rhythms worrying the ecliptic like a brush vibrating the water in a Tibetan singing bowl. Cancer is deeply invested in the earth, but with the watchful (even maternal) remove of its lunar satellite. If the Sun is life, the Moon is the medium of time in which life is suspended. For Cancer, time is ensouled and profoundly alive. Carl Jung, a Cancer of course, describes the awakening experience of synchronicity as the glimmers we first perceive of time’s divine intelligence:
“It seems, indeed, as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities or fundamentals which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, as in case of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions … whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.”
The USA is a Cancerian country, assuming a Thema-Mundi like helm position in the affairs of the world — its fundamental mythos of manifest destiny echoing its expansive Sagittarius ascendant. The Cancer New Moon triggered the USA’s natal Jupiter and was within range of its 8th house Cancer Sun. The 8th house is a money house (vast concentrations of wealth) but it’s also a place of sorrow, grief, death and catharsis. This New Moon was also sidled against Black Moon Lilith — a theoretical point where the Moon reaches its apogee (the furthest it will drift from the earth in the wave pattern of its orbit).
Lilith’s archetype is tangled up in bitter recriminations of her succubus-like undoing of feminine nurturance, motherhood, and the procreative impulse itself. She’s seen as a baby killer, an inducer of stillbirths, and a demon that triggers wet dreams. She also presides over a wild, emancipated divine feminine that I’ve written about at length in other essays.
In any case, the constitutional crisis gripping the States now feels like it could open a portal into civil war, the charioteer's oppositional sphinxes threatening to pull the cart into pieces. As I finish writing this piece, on the Fourth of July, chaotic scenes already from two separate shootings: a parade suddenly dissembling into a stampede and revellers fleeing and screaming against a backdrop of fireworks.
What civil war would even look like in these schizophrenic times is of course anyone’s guess, but the last time it broke out was during a U.S. Uranus return — a transit not far on the horizon. If Pluto is rotting the foundations, Uranus could very well be the lightning strike to finish the tower off. For the moment, one can feel the desperate vice-grip of those crab claws as collapse accelerates — the darkest, most gripping, most conservative impulses of Cancer unleashed.
It’s hard not to see the dismantling of Roe v Wade as a complete perversion of the Cancer archetype as that 8th house US stellium continues to implode. As the dung beetle parades the life-giving Sun along the horizon, it also drags it back into the underworld. These Cancerian mysteries unfold in a metaphysical space that is out of reach of the hand of the State. And perhaps this is what is so triggering for certain Supreme Court judges — Cancer’s hidden and fecund self-sufficiency as it midwives souls through the Portal of Man.
Just as there are plants that can support a healthy pregnancy, there are plants that can release a soul back into the earth. Perhaps part of the Uranus in Taurus story will be a revival of this wisdom… resistance through herbalism. My own views on abortion are complex: though I’m staunchly pro-choice, I recoil at abortion positivity (though that’s not quite the right phrase). Just as a birth is sacred, an abortion is sacred and I don’t think we do ourselves any favor by minimizing the complex emotional landscape of this event. It’s one of the sorrows that women unfortunately learn to bear well.
What I can say with certainty is that the supreme court’s violation of this secret inner landscape reeks of a desperate act of sublimation. Facing the wholesale failure of averting the climate crisis, what can the State control? Instead of waging war on the anthropocene, the opioid epidemic, poverty, or the Plutonic hoarding of wealth by pedophile kleptocrats, it’s the womb that’s under assault.
If the Plutonic shadow is not integrated, it will be deflected. For a country that not only has a Cancer Sun, but also Jupiter exalted in Cancer (the chart ruler no less) it’s deeply unsettling to see reproductive freedom under attack. That said, Saturn is also grinding back and forth over the US’s Aquarius Moon for the coming months — a sobering transit that also brings to mind restriction of the divine feminine (and captures the leaden malaise gripping the USA now).
Of course this is the ultimate wedge issue in keeping the masses divided — eating their own rather than organizing (and note how quickly Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentencing and a certain list vanished from the headlines). With Covid fading from the news cycle too, the elites need something else to keep the masses activated and malleable. This rage-baiting feels especially intense as Mars squares up against Pluto before entering Taurus tonight. The last time Mars ingressed from the sign of its domicile to Taurus the events of January 6th unfolded.
There’s so much more to say about the new cycle and the transits rocking the USA’s chart, but I’ll let Cormac McCarthy have the last word.
“The truth about the world … is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.” (From Blood Meridian)
And some much needed catharsis, via X-Ray Spex (the wonderful Poly Styrene is team Cancer).