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TWELVE PHASES OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE: CANCER
With the summer solstice, a climactic point in the year's cycle is reached. The longest day meets the shortest night, the triumphant Day-force streaming forth from the noon-day Sun begins to wane before the ascendant power of the Night-force. Summer has come and the glory of fruitions. But fruition and fulfillment create new realizations and new tasks. Out of "union" is born the duty to direct the process of formation and of growth of the results of that union; and first of all the need to circumscribe expansion in order to bring these forces of formation and growth to the clearest possible focus.
The zodiacal sign Cancer represents the principle of focalization of formative life-energies for the purpose of producing as clear-cut and as permanent an image or impression as possible. It therefore brings a reversal of trend to the process of vivid extension of being through new relationships which Gemini started. Just as Taurus repolarizes the direction of the Day-force in Aries, so Cancer redirects the energies of Gemini. Taurus and Cancer are considered as "feminine" Signs. Taurus' "earth" is needed to arrest and to complete the "fire" of Aries. Cancer's "Water" condenses the "airy" extension and the all-penetrating quality of Gemini.
Gemini spreads its search for new relationships over the whole world of experience; even as it builds words, sentences and intellectual systems, it does so with a peculiar abandon and lack of concern for ultimate results. All that the Gemini person seeks to achieve is personal security in making ever-new contacts. He seeks temporary intellectual control through verbal formulation. He takes care that in extending himself he remains always within familiar structures. Therefore he never discards his own spectacles, but be carries these spectacles to every land and situation possible. He would not care if anyone else used or did not use such spectacles, except that being well-known as the originator of a particularly good kind of spectacles makes it easier for him to establish advantageously many more new contacts.
For instance, in matters of love Gemini will take care to have his approach to the opposite sex well defined in his own mind, so that the shock of being overwhelmed by a love of elemental power may be avoided. He will classify his reactions, his types of women, while pushing always forward and to new horizons his curiosity and eagerness for love. And if he likes to be known as a Don Juan it is only because such a reputation may "extend more vividly" the field of his contacts. Gemini may become completely bound by his formulations and categories, by his logic and his expectations; but he is only personally bound. He does not insist that other people should be likewise bound by the same patterns; thus he can be tolerant and he loves fair play, yet he is at the same time quite unable to get actually the other person's point of view.
He has tolerance but no real understanding; whereas Sagittarius can have understanding even when he is most intolerant, for Sagittarius can perceive sympathetically how a social situation produced in a person a certain attitude, and he may not blame the person. But if he does not approve of situation and attitude be will probably act with extreme intolerance with regard to the ideas implied — even though be may understand and sympathize with the person holding the ideas.
In Cancer we witness a sudden cancellation of Gemini's eager extension. Boundaries are reached; the curiosity for new relationships is absorbed by an event which leads to a complete reversal of motion. The Sun stops in northern skies, and sunsets begin to bend southward. There is a brief pause and all things change polarity. The Day-force has reached its maximum intensity. It must slowly let itself be superseded by the matriarchal power of the Night-force. Wherever extension had reached, there definite boundaries are set. If they are to be pushed back still farther, it will be on a new basis of activity; on a social and mental, rather than on a physiological and personal basis.
What has really happened to effect the reversal? Just this, that the individual self, being no longer able to resist the pressure of the universal life-force, has had to open itself to the universe and to society. Such an opening up could theoretically occur in any way best fitted to the individual's need. And it does occur freely and at every moment in the man who has reached a certain level of integration and freedom; in the man who has become free from the results of frustration and repressions imposed upon his growth by parents and antecedents, by the past of his race — and if one believes in reincarnation — of his Soul; free from subconscious as well as conscious memories.
But in the ordinary man of today such memories, frustrations and failures are strong. Subconscious fears have arisen in Aries, biological-racial inertia and possessiveness in Taurus, intellectually crystallized formulations in Gemini. Thus when the individual faces, in Cancer, the reversal of his life-force and is flooded by universal life or confronted with the need of participating in human society after he has "come of age," the confrontation is highly upsetting. Irrational, biological, emotional, devotional forces rush from the unconscious and tend to overwhelm the conscious. Therefore the individual must be protected; the onsurge of the unconscious must be canalized, made safer. And this need is the reason for "Marriage" and for what the occultist calls "Initiation." One mate and one Initiator — whereas all life could be mate and Initiator, if men had the integrative strength sufficient not to be overwhelmed by the ever changing confrontations life would present to him; if man were conscious enough to be at any time and in any condition a focal point for universal life — for God. And he would have no need of a wife or of child-bearing to force upon him in a particular way and in only one such manner — the realization that his goal and his fulfillment are to be found in the discharge of his responsibility to life, in his conscious willingness to be a focus in and through which Life or God may speak.
God might speak through the individual in myriads of voices, one for the need of every moment. But because the individual grew under the malformative influence of fear, inertia and mental crystallization, the stone of man is not a clear crystal. It must be ground. The individual must love and suffer, bend to homely tasks and deprivation, yearn amidst brief happiness and "give up his self" to find "Life eternal." Yet fulfillment, in essence and reality, is here and now. There is nothing to "give up," but fallacies. All that is needed to become a lens able to focus divinity is to become consciously what one inherently is, and to be it with clarity, in beauty and in truth.
A lens to focus life. For the ordinary man at this stage of human evolution life here means "humanity"; it could mean, it will mean some day "divinity." The home and the "human, all too human" marriage are conditioned by the factor of "humanity" and "society" by the education received by the child, by parental frustrations. Abnormal development in childhood and adolescence makes the youth cling to the Day-force; makes him want it to grow and grow through an ever-extended Gemini phase. He should willingly and understandingly open himself to the increase of the Night-force. Such is the lesson of the summer solstice, of Cancer. There must be repolarization; but humanity today must be compelled to repolarize itself. It must be compelled to open itself to the Night-force, the Mystery of Space and the Brotherhood of the Stars; for it would not do it willingly, whether as individuals or as nations. And this is our present world problem.
What is the nature of that compulsion? A sudden arousal of the irrational, instinctual, biological forces rooted in the blood; a sudden arousal of "feelings," of psychic visions also. We call this, "falling in love"; today also, in the social sphere, we call it mass-devotion to dictators extolling the "call of the blood" — or to Prophets who bring to men in one particular form (whence dogmatism) the Revelation from God. These are various aspects of the same process in the individual and in humanity: this process is the change from Gemini to Cancer, that "conversion" which reverses the direction of the life-force.
Let us realize that it need not be a violent, fanatic, passional "conversion." The biological-emotional or religious urge need not overwhelm the consciousness; but it will overwhelm it of necessity where the consciousness is un-free, set in ego crystallizations, unyielding, or steeped in "complexes" and glamour. That means, alas! mostly everywhere. And thus we have organized and set totalitarianism in all realms — enforced unity — as a perhaps unavoidable safeguard against utter disintegration; moral disintegration in the individual, anarchy in human society.
So few persons have understood the mystery of the symbol of Cancer, the Crab! A watery creature, whose movements are regressive or side-stepping, whose evolution has been led into the blind alley constituted by the wearing of a hard shell encasing life — yet a shell which is temporarily shed at every new cycle, one must not forget! A creature of the sea; and the sea always symbolizes the collective or rather the generic Unconscious, the universal Matrix of life.
Here we have just as negative a type of symbolization as we find in Scorpio. One step further and we find the connection between Cancer and the deadly disease of the same name. Why such a negative emphasis? Because the Ancients who built this zodiacal symbolism knew well that the real, positive, God-releasing significance of the summer solstice could hardly be given out. In the Western world we have to go to Christian Scriptures to find more complete references to the summer solstice as to the "Marriage of Heaven and Earth"; of Christ and the Bride, humanity: Christ focused through the mystic Incarnation in man. But in India, if we only understand the real meaning of the concept of Avatar, of ideas which presumably the great Sankaracharya taught — he who was born with the Sun in Cancer — then we would grasp the real significance of this birth of the summer. This might help us to understand our own United States and our potential world-destiny, as we too were born nationally under the Sign, Cancer. Is it not significant indeed that our most dreaded disease today has also been named cancer?
Is the higher destiny of the Cancer type to build a particular, set and rigid home, or is it rather to serve as a focus for a new manifestation of God? Is the United States fulfilled in a narrow nationalism, in homes so badly broken up by crystallized complex-ridden individualism and consequent divorces; or is our world-destiny that of being — at a time when most nations have "fallen in love" with dictators and blood-rooted, home-extolling totalitarianism — a focal point for a new, world-encompassing Avatar-force or Christ-force? Cancer comes nine months before the future Aries. Cancer is the symbol of fecundation — but will it be a divine or a strictly human fecundation? Cancer is man in the God-impregnated state; a Holy Place in which God has descended.
In the usual practice of astrology the type of personality characterized by Cancer is represented as being often dominated by moods and psychic gifts. What is not always realized is that these psychic manifestations are the results of an irruption of the universal life-force into the individualized consciousness which becomes more or less disorganized thereby. Such an irruption can mean a great many things; from the peculiar rapture of passionate love to the upsets of the first weeks of pregnancy, from psychic hallucinations to God-inspired seership, from glamorous lies to Avatarship. And we must not forget the recoil from this irruption of the Night-force, the clinging to a particular form, a particular home, a particular feeling, the jealousies and possessiveness which are the shadows of the integration of one man and one woman — all born of fear, of the terrific fear of what might happen with a "change of focus."
The Cancer type contains all that. It can be the most helpless or the most determined in a strange, silent way. It refers to a time of the year when the Sun moves very slowly; stands still. There is a stillness about it at the same time that there is the possibility of intense light. It is the moment of the longest days; yet astrology makes it ruled by the Moon, waiting until one more sign to glorify in Leo the creative radiance of the Sun.
This is because all great sacraments come when there is a pause, silence and tremor. Man possessed by God, or by the beloved, is at first overwhelmed by the union. Everything must be reconsidered, all motion and motives reversed. And in those short intense nights when the Feast of St. John is celebrated there may be tumult in the outer world, but there is stillness in the Holy Place where Night enfolds Day, and Life is conceived anew.
