Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Cancer is drawn as two opposed curls, read most often as the claws or pincers of the crab, and by others as two clasping arms, or as the crab seen from above. A further suggestion traces the form to a scarab beetle written in Demotic script, the Egyptians having placed a scarab rather than a crab in this part of the sky; the derivation is contested and no ancient source settles it. The Greek myth gives the crab that Hera sent to nip Heracles during his fight with the Hydra, set among the stars for its trouble. The sign is cardinal water and holds the summer solstice in the tropical zodiac, and the glyph stands for what a shell is for: protection, containment, feeling held close, memory, home, and the tidal rhythm of retreat and return.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe twelve-sign zodiac was standardised in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE and fixed as equal signs in Hellenistic astrology. Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormTwo curled forms, often read as a crab's claws. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Cancer is the fourth sign, a cardinal water sign ruled by the Moon, with the Crab as its emblem, its opening degree marking the northern summer solstice each year. The crab itself is an old fixture of Near Eastern sky lore, but the compact written glyph now used to mark the sign on a chart belongs to a much later layer of history. It surfaces alongside the other zodiacal notation in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, everyday documents of the early centuries CE catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in their standard reference work Greek Horoscopes, was copied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition, and only reached its familiar printed shape in the Renaissance, once astronomical almanacs and ephemerides, following the model of Regiomontanus's Nuremberg press of the 1470s, began setting the zodiac signs in type rather than copying them out by hand generation after generation. Cancer's Unicode codepoint is U+264B, one of the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a range of two hundred fifty-six codepoints spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Hera, Deities This source names Hera directly: "The Greek myth gives the crab that Hera sent to nip Heracles during his fight with the Hydra, set among the stars for its trouble."
This source names Heracles directly: "The Greek myth gives the crab that Hera sent to nip Heracles during his fight with the Hydra, set among the stars for its trouble."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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