On occasion of: Full Moon in Cancer:
12/26/23 7:33 pm PT
”What makes Cancer tenacious?
The Moon rules thе fluids, including the inner juices of human bеings
That which assimilates and feeds the body
So the Crab feeds his astral brain
Assimilating and distributing all he receives, slowly, until it becomes a part of him.”
So explains Nancy Priddy on track “Planetary Motivations (Cancer)” from electronic music pioneer Mort Garson’s record“Signs Of The Zodiac: Cancer”: released as 1/12th of a complete series of Zodiac albums in the notably Cancerian year of 1969.
Modern music listeners are more likely to come across Priddy’s words sampled on DJ Shadow’s "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" released in 1996— a year which turned the crab-claws of 1969 outward, in a probably meaningless coincidence.1
In "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" DJ Shadow—a Cancer-sun— juxtaposes the sample of Priddy with a sample from “George Marsh on Drums: Interviewed by Terry McGovern”. On this record, American Jazz drummer George Marsh reflects on how he taught himself to play the drums as an intuitive process of listening and repeating:
From listening to records, I just knew what to do
I mainly taught myself
And, you know, I did pretty well
Except there were a few mistakes…
That… I have just recently cleared up…
I'd like to just continue to be able to express myself
As best as I can on the instrument
…I feel like I have a lot of work to do still, you know
I'm a student of the drums
And I'm also a teacher of the drums too…
And I would like to able to continue to let what is inside of me
…which comes from all the music that I hear
You know, I'd like for that to come out
And it's like, it's not really me that's coming
The music's coming through me
The music's coming through me
*Emphasis added.
Online discourse is scant on this point, and even the usually insightful Genius.com page on the track seems to miss it. But the significance of the juxtaposition of the Priddy and Marsh monologues is clear to the student of astrology:
DJ Shadow identifies his life-path of being a musician—and especially as a cutting-and-sampling DJ—with his Cancer-sun. Shadow intuitively “assimilat[es] and distribut[es] all he receives, slowly, until it becomes a part of him” just as fellow-musician George Marsh intuitively learned his craft simply by listening to and absorbing music.
The moon-ruled, water-sign of Cancer is auspicious for any musician or artist. Just as the moon is sensitive to the gravitational pull of all other planets, the Cancer is an intuitive feeler, existing in, what elsewhere on the “Planetary Motivations” Mort Garson track is described as a “sea of sensation, imagination, and emotion”. The quality of the Cancer to assimilate all that he feels, make it part of himself, and re-offer it to the world through his work is also analogous with the omnivorous diet of the crab, who scuttles about beneath the surf consuming “algae, molluscs, worms, other crustaceans, fungi, bacteria, and detritus”2. The crab, of course, is what lends Cancer it’s name and sign:
In DJ Shadow’s case, replace the food-stuffs of the bottom feeder with sounds and sonic curios found deep within record-crates. The output: a crossing of instrumental hip-hop with the sample-heavy, sound-collage genre variously called plunderphonics, or sampledelia.
What makes DJ Shadow’s debut “Entroducing……” one of the key album’s of the 90’s, in my view, is this quality of absorption re-contextualized release. “Endtroducing....”. immediately establishes itself as an of-the-moment addition to the mid-90’s catalogue of trip and hip hop, also haunted by the ghosts of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. The Cancerian Gen-Xer reflects and refracts all he has absorbed in his twenty-something years. In addition to the Garson, John Carpenter, Twin Peaks, and George Marsh samples already noted, the album extensively samples the Soul, Jazz, Hip Hop, and Psychedelic records of yesteryear as well as clips from B-movies and comedians.
In this way—released roughly a decade before the world-wide-web would give everyone access to a bottomless archive of audio-visual information —“Endtroducing....” prefigures music genres like hauntology and vaporwave, and perhaps even meme-culture as a whole.
I am not a Cancer-sun but a Cancer-moon (a designation which, given the moon’s rulership over Cancer, sometimes makes me feel even more moon-bound than moon-children proper). I am also not a musician, but I like to think there is something of plunderphonics in the particular type of writing I am doing about these cards: utilizing a free-flow of citations, concepts, and as many pop-cultural references as I can to attempt to strike at more universal archetypes. I doubt this makes for as accessible a reading experience as my more recent works of fiction but onward…
To get into the moon proper: Rider-Waite’s version portrays a lobster beckoned from the depths of a river-bed. He joins two-howling hounds gazing up at the sun-illumined moon at the outset of a winding path leading between two towers.
As noted in my write-up on “Death” , the towers in the Rider Waite moon card can be seen in the back corner of that card:
In both The Moon and Death we can interpret passing between the two towers as an act of personal transformation. This is not entirely unrelated to the pillars of Boaz and Jachin— the pillars which once sat in front of Solomon’s Temple—as featured in The High Priestess card and Masonic ritual:
The key to both the pillar and tower imagery, as I understand them, is the identification of the act of passing through as an act of transformation and enlightenment. In the case of Boaz and Jachin the one who walks in between represents the balance of the opposing forces represented by each pillar, and we can speculate upon something similar in the case of the Moon card’s towers: the ascent from the unconscious to the conscious, or even from id to superego.
Note that in possible support of this idea, The High Priestess has a crescent moon at her feet in the Rider-Waite deck, and is attributed to the planetary symbol of the Moon in the Thoth deck. Indeed, Crowley identifies The High Priestess as a higher avatar of the Moon. Both The High Priestess and the Moon are aspects of what some call “the Divine Femme” linking the human and divine: The High Priestess by bridging “the abyss” between Kether and Tifereth, and The Moon in the earthier sphere, bridging Netzach with Malkuth.
Crowley explains:
“The Moon, partaking as she does of the highest and the lowest, and filling all the space between, is the most universal of the Planets. In her higher aspect, she occupies the place of the Link between the human and divine”
But clarifies that this does not quite match the The Moon of Trump 18, which instead represents: “the waning moon, the moon of witchcraft and abominable deeds. She is the poisoned darkness which is the condition of the rebirth of light”.3
If the High Priestess represents a luminous, comforting, aspect of spirituality, then The Moon represents the shadow of this: occult forces, the unconscious, the unknown, witchcraft. In a reading, the moon might represent the process of things in darkness coming into light, but alternatively might represent things in darkness staying there indefinitely: deep-seated misunderstandings, deception.
The Lobster of the Marseilles and Rider-Waite card is not the crab most readily associated with the sign of cancer, but represents about the same—crabs, lobsters, and crayfish all representing roughly the general “clawed-crustacean” archetype as noted in this helpful Meme Analysis vid and elsewhere.
Also well-discussed in the Meme-Analysis video is the significance of the Lobster as a symbol of the unconscious and the id: the troller of murky depths. In the most aspirational reading of The Moon card, it represents the dawning of the light of the superego onto the murk of the id: unconscious reality being drawn up for view. This is reflected in the tripartite division of the card into waters, land, and sky, which the Meme Analysis vid maps onto the tripartite division of id, ego, and superego.
”Where id was, ego shall be”, said Freud. Or as a German Studies Professor I once studied under translated it (more directly, as he reckoned): “Where IT was I shall be”. This is a rallying cry to anyone who ever wanted to replace the dark chaos of the unconscious with the light and control of egoic day.
Of course, as noted, the card may not always be so positive or aspirational, and may well, at times, represent a more sinister, immovable unconscious or hidden threat.
The Moon is, what? A hidden force which exerts its control over the tides and indeed all things on earth. It would be fully invisible were it not for the light of the sun that it reflects. The Moon is intrinsically not of light, like the unconscious, but can be brought into light. Crowley explains that this card represents “midnight” but quotes Keats: "There is a budding morrow in midnight".
In that midnight moment between rising moon and rising sun, a transformation can occur. The underworld can be passed through, resulting in a new psychological or esoteric understanding.
Crowley’s card harkens directly back to Egypt, but plays with many of the same motifs as the Rider-Wait. The sacred beetle, which also has pincers, plays the role of the lobster in the Thoth card, a switch that was actually made earlier in the Hermetic Deck:
Crowley explains: “at the bottom of the card, underneath the water which is tinged with graphs of abomination, the sacred Beetle, the Egyptian Khephra, bearing in his mandibles the Solar Disk. It is this Beetle that bears the Sun in his Silence through the darkness of Night and the bitterness of Winter.”
The beetle takes a more active role in the Thoth card than the Lobster in the Hermetic card, but his journey through the land of black soil is as harrowing as anything discussed with regard to id, ego and superego:
This path is guarded by Tabu. She is uncleanliness and sorcery. Upon the hills are the black towers of nameless mystery, of horror and of fear. All prejudice, all superstition, dead tradition - and ancestral loathing, all combine to darken her face before the eyes of men. It needs unconquerable courage to begin to tread this path. Here is a weird, deceptive life. The fiery sense is baulked. The moon has no air. The knight upon this quest has to rely on the three lower senses: touch, taste and smell. Such light as there may be is deadlier than darkness, and the silence is wounded by the howling of wild beasts.
To what god shall we appeal for aid? It is Anubis, the watcher in the twilight, the god that stands upon the threshold, the jackal god of Khem, who stands in double form between the Ways. At his feet, on watch, wait the jackals themselves, to devour the carcasses of those who have not seen Him, or who have not known His Name.
One element omitted from the Hermetic card, but quite explicit in Rider Waite and brought back by Crowley are the drops falling from the moon resembling “Yods” of the Hebrew alphabet.
The Yod is the smallest of Hebrew letter: scarcely more than a “Jot”, which word its name is related to. The Yod appears twice in the Tetragrammaton, represents a dot of energy, and can be found as an ideogram in other Tarot cards including the Rider-Waite Tower card and Thoth Ace Of Wands.
The Hebrew letter associated with the Moon is not “Yod” but “Qoph”, however. This letter is pronounced “Koph” and makes a /q/ sound. Crowley tells us the meaning of the letter is “the back of the head.. connected with the potencies of the cerebellum”, but other interpretations identify the letter with the eye of a needle. Either way: we might discern a connection between the letter and the pathway between the towers in card, representing what Crowley describes as a “gateway to resurrection”.
Similarly, despite the above associations between the astrological sign of Cancer and The Moon, Trump 18 is in fact attributed to another astrological sign altogether: that of Pisces. Cancer is closely related ideogrammatically to The Moon while not being officially attributed to it4. This may seem strange or arbitrary, and perhaps it does exemplify how attempts to chart the Tarot onto multiple esoteric systems —the Kabbalah, the Zodiac, etc., as engaged in by Crowley and many other esotericists of the 19th and early 20th centuries—might lead to some stretches and strange choices. The association of the Death card with Scorpio rather than the scythe-wielding symbol of Saturn—to which it is also closely ideogrammatically related— is another example of this.
Yet the symbol of Pisces— a fish—may have a relevant attribute in common with Cancer as the crab. As in the case of the crab: the symbol is that of a thing moving about beneath the water. The id or the unconscious potentially reeled up and “saved” by the superego as in the image of Christ as fisher of men.
For Crowley, Pisces also has significance as the last of the signs of winter: the darkness before dawn. Again that image of midnight with the promise of a budding tomorrow.
“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
—Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.
I am sparing in how literal-minded I am about astrology. I will confess, however, to feeling connected to the moon—perhaps given my moon’s placement in Cancer, or perhaps given a more general/inexplicable affinity. In 2023, I experienced enough bouts of depression coinciding with the darkness of new moon periods to gain an effeminized sense of having my own “time of the month”. This might seem cringey to some or offensive to others, but the metaphor was inescapable, “menstruation”obviously being rooted to the moon conceptually in ways I hardly need to explain.
Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae of how woman is more rooted to nature, as—whether she chooses to have children or not—menstruation roots her firmly to the undulant processes of nature. No matter how ambitious and goal-oriented (phallic) a woman might be, nature defeats and grounds her skyward ambitions anew each month.
My undulant depression felt something like this in 2023. If 75% of the time I felt my various projects, endeavors, and life-choices were moving toward something definite and good, then the other 25% of the time (again: recurring on a something like monthly basis) I felt the absence of this keenly: a sense of something being wrong accompanied by an exhaustive existential questioning or else a deep-seated sense of futility , even nihilism. All was rooted to an underlying feeling of incompleteness or limitedness.
Approaching astrology as at least a thought experiment: I am a Sag-Sun, Cancer-Moon. The tension is between Fire and Water which have a tendency to cancel each other out.
In the Thoth deck, Fire-of-Water is represented by the Knight of Cups, who bears in his cup the crab: the cardinal sign of water. I identify with this card but find no peace in Crowley’s description thereof:
“it is rare indeed to meet with a person who has succeeded in harmonizing these conflicting elements. He tends to mismanage all his affairs; and unless sheer good fortune attend him, his whole career will be an unbroken record of failure and disaster. Often his mental "civil war" ends in schizophrenia or melancholy madness. The abuse of stimulants and narcotics may precipitate the catastrophe.”5
I can view my competing sun and moon signs as easy foils. Sagittarius: optimistic, male, and outward directed (phallic, we might even say). Cancer: moody and effeminate, oriented forever in an undulant, if productive, direction. I’d like to think some productive balance could be found between these too signs, but I cannot overstate the tension: one seeks home and comfort, one seeks adventure and danger. Etc. Etc.
Alternatively, the tension between Fire and Water may not be so much of mutual negation as a failure to meaningfully complement. Since we cited the series earlier, let’s look at how the Sag-Sun Cancer-Moon is described in Mort Garson’s Zodiac record series:
”The sun in Sagittarius and the moon in Cancer is capable of dreaming the impossible dream
And having it happen
Your approach is distinctly yours
Whatever you do springs from your imagination, which is as unique as your thumbprint
One quality that fire and water have in common, is that uncontained they spread
This your Achilles heel because it feels so good to just let yourself go.”
In this time of Saturn Return, I can certainly relate to the pains of confinement. Feeling every choice as the negation of other choices, and the general waning of the horizon. And yet I also know to “let myself go” entirely would at this point have no clear and beautiful shape, but only the fizzling and waning effect of Fire and Water let out of control.
In the background of it all: the changing of the “inconstant” moon. The lord of “flux and reflux” as it is dubbed in the Hermetic card.
I have had a numerological obsession with 6’s and 9’s my entire life, and especially ‘69’ though not for sexual reasons. It was only in my late twenties, after becoming interested in Astrology that I came to associate the 69 with the sign of Cancer and my Cancer moon. Earlier in life, the most profound association I could come up with was the similarity between the 69 and the “Yin-Yang”:
And indeed the Yin-Yang is not unrelated the flux and reflux represented by the crab claws of cancer, and the motions of the moon, in which an element of darkness is always present in the light, and an element of light always present in the dark.
We must certainly look at Crowley’s last paragraph in the book of Thoth which ties The Moon in with the “dark night of the soul”, and other such topics, but finds its own optimistic take on the “poisoned darkness which is the condition of the rebirth of light”:
This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating. Not the benign, solar intoxication of Dionysus, but the dreadful madness of pernicious drugs; this is a drunkenness of sense, after the mind has been abolished by the venom of this Moon. This is that which is written of Abraham in the Book of the Beginning: "An horror of great darkness came upon him." One is reminded of the mental echo of subconscious realization, of that supreme iniquity which mystics have constantly celebrated in their accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul. But the best men, the true men, do not consider the matter in such terms at all. Whatever horrors may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, whatever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage: "How splendid is the Adventure!"
This year, a full moon in Cancer comes on the second night of Christmas and the 5th night of Yule (which stated on the Winter Solstice: 12/21, the shortest day of the year). What all Holidays placed at this time of year have in common is that they are festivals of light: the coming of Christ—the light of the world—for Christmas, the persistence of lamp oil for Hanukkah, etc.
All is explicable in terms of nature: 12/21 is the shortest day of the year, and so across cultures and religions humans take a break from labor and attune themselves to whatever light can be found (spiritual, symbolic, man-made, etc.) The hope is not entirely false—for as scarce as the sun is on the Solstice, the polarity is finally reversed: days from here-on-out will get longer until June. Reflections on The Moon card— especially in its aspect as midnight containing a “budding morrow”— is therefore well-suited to this time of the year.
In my case: I take the full moon lunar return as represented by the full moon in Cancer as a great blessing and an auspicious sign for 2024. Hopefully it is a sign of things becoming manifest, and of dark nights of the soul coming to an end.
This hope I extend to this blog and to you the reader.
Happy New Years and see you next year!
Notes for future esoteric interpretation of DJ Shadow’s 1996 debut album “Endtroducing....”: Such a reflection would have to include reflections on the 9’s and 6’s numerology, as well as the forthcoming reflection on Shadow’s identification with Cancer. It would also have to deal with the thrice-repeated sampling of the “This Is Not A Dream” sequence from John Carpenter’s Prince Of Darkness, coupled in the last instance with the giant warning Dale Cooper that “it is happening again” in Twin Peaks.
"This is not a dream,” the transmission from Prince of Darkness goes “we are using to using your brain as a receiver…we are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference…you are receiving this broadcast as a dream…we are transmitting from the year one-nine-nine-nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing…our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious mind…this is not a dream…what you are seeing is actually occurring.”
What was Shadow trying to reverse course of before 1999? What was happening again? Did it all have to do with the commercial fate of Hip Hop, or something more sinister?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab#:~:text=Crabs%20are%20omnivores%2C%20feeding%20primarily,fastest%20growth%20and%20greatest%20fitness.
Again that idea of rebirth: where The Moon diverges from High Priestess she finds common ground with Death: well-described as “Child of the Great Transformers” in the Hermetic deck. Another point of commonality between Death and The Moon: they are each attributed to water signs,—Death to the fixed sign of Scorpio, The Moon to the mutable sign of Pisces. (The third, cardinal sign of water being Cancer). All of these embody the power of water to renew, whether analogous with dramatic means (the scorpion stinging itself when faced with fire) or something more passive as in the flux and reflux of the moon.
The tarot card attributed to Cancer is in fact, The Chariot— a card representing the whirling equilibrium of free-flowing universe, and will-power/drive in the realm of human affairs—which I will have to write about sooner rather than later.
Crowley contrasts this card negatively with the Queen of Wands (Water of Fire) in which “Water is the calming and modulating influence” whereas in the knight of cups “it is Fire which creates trouble”. Perhaps the the Queen of Wands represents a more auspicious mixing of the two elements, but I find the Knight more aesthetically relatable.