Cancer 1

Cancer opens with the Moon's own cardinal water, the sign of the crab and its shell, and this first degree falls in Venus's decan and in the opening term still ruled by Mars, the planet the Egyptian bounds table gives the earliest degrees of Cancer to precisely because the sign itself has no natural claim on a malefic. The picture given for the degree is a vessel at sea whose crew take down the colors they have sailed under and run up different ones in their place, a public, deliberate act performed in view of everyone aboard rather than a private change of heart.

Marc Edmund Jones and Elsie Wheeler produced this scene between them in Balboa Park on a single day in 1925, Jones reading the blank degree aloud from a shuffled index card and Wheeler, who could barely turn her head for the arthritis that had disabled her, describing whatever came to her unprompted. The interpretation attached to the image today is Dane Rudhyar's, written in 1973 for An Astrological Mandala, not Jones's own 1953 wording, and it reads the flag change as a point of no return, an allegiance abandoned in one symbolic gesture rather than worn away by slow attrition. That is a generous reading of what could just as easily be desertion or expedience, changing colors because the wind has changed rather than because conviction has. Cancer's own concern, belonging and the people one answers to, is present either way; the degree simply insists that at the cardinal point of the year's most private sign, some loyalties get renounced in public, on deck, where they can be seen.

This degree is already described as falling in a decan named for the Chaldean face sequence and a term drawn from the Egyptian bounds table, but neither label says who compiled either system or when. The Chaldean decan rulers, Venus governing this opening third of Cancer, come from Vettius Valens, a Greek speaking astrologer writing around the year 175, who divided every sign into three ten degree faces under a fixed rotation of planets.

The Egyptian bounds, which give this degree to Mars, are recorded by Ptolemy in the Tetrabiblos as an older table he inherited rather than devised himself. Neither writer attached a picture to any degree, only a ruling planet. A complete set of individual degree pictures first survives whole in 1494, in Johannes Angelus's Astrolabium Planum, a Latin work safely public domain, though no old English translation of it is.

The next complete English set is Welsh minister John Thomas's, writing as Charubel, whose 1898 book gives this opening degree of Cancer a large clock with its weights in sight, suspended from a high place, its dial plate complete with hours and hands, a picture of time made visibly mechanical rather than felt. Practically, this degree is mostly used to time events through a progressed Sun, Moon or angle reaching it exactly, or to flag two charts sharing it in synastry.