I was rummaging through one of my boxes where I stash handwritten quotes on index cards—looking for some Cancer inspiration—when I found this one. I copied it down at some point, in my own handwriting, and I had no memory of doing it. The quote had been waiting there, patient, while I forgot it existed:
“The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies” (James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul). Hillman’s rising sign was Cancer. As a double Aries and self-described “renegade psychologist,” he focused on deconstructing psychology, but met the world through a crab’s sideways gait.
Jungian analyst Esther Harding, who was a close associate of Jung, and was born when the Sun and Mercury were in Cancer, tells us how the soul does what it does, “The moon insinuates into man’s mind ideas and intuitions which are not at all in accordance with intellectual standards but are strange and bizarre… they may be creatively new” (Harding, Women’s Mysteries: Ancient & Modern). The crab pulls into its shell—not to hide, but to listen.
Shortly after his mother Abigail Adams died, her son John Quincy Adams, whose Sun sign was Cancer, wrote this in his diary in tribute to her: “A more prudent, more affectionate, more indulgent, and more energetic mother, never was a blessing to a child. Her life was a series of continuous self-sacrifices for those she loved.” His wife Louisa, who had a Cancer Moon sign, described her mother-in-law Abigail as “the guiding Planet around which all revolved.”
Adams didn’t summon that memory of his mother—it arrived on its own, just like the quote that found me in my box. Today’s New Moon in Cancer works the same way: not something you do, but something that happens to you if you let it.
What’s sitting in your box right now, forgotten, waiting for a reason to surface?
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In depth,
Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
