Cancer’s Archetypal Pattern | Achilles: The Mummy’s Boy Who Defied His Mother | Kafka’s Tenderness
In popular horoscope culture, Cancer has a reputation for being shy, sensitive, nostalgic, or prone to sulking. Sometimes these labels are true, sometimes not. So what is this sign really about, and what does it have to reveal to us?
In most cases, even if you do not have any planets in Cancer, there will still be a Cancer-ruled area in your chart. In that area, we are faced with a very basic question, one that is often forgotten by mainstream culture: to what extent are we able to feel, and to accept, our emotions?
This episode will introduce you to the deep psychological patterns that lie beneath Cancer’s surface of privacy and self-protection, and to its path towards self-realisation. We will explore the sign through its element, its modality, its mythology, and through a few Cancerian artists, especially Franz Kafka, the author of The Metamorphosis, as we trace the hero’s journey of Cancer.
According to the memories of Dora Diamant, Kafka’s companion during the last years of his life, a year before Kafka died, they were walking in a park when they met a little girl who was crying because she had lost her doll. Kafka told the girl that he was the doll’s postman, and that the doll had simply gone travelling. At the time, Kafka was already extremely weak from tuberculosis, but he still dragged himself on through illness and faithfully played the part of the doll’s letter writer.
In his letters, Kafka told the girl that the doll had gone to London, Paris, and other places. Three weeks later, Kafka bought the girl a new doll. The girl said at the time, “It does not look like my doll.” Kafka then had another letter, in which the doll told the girl, “My travels have changed me.” Six months later, Kafka died of illness.
There is another widely circulated ending to this story. Years later, the girl supposedly found a note tucked inside the doll, which said: “Every thing you love is likely to be lost. Yet in the end, love will return to you in another form.”
This ending is very likely not true, just as the doll did not really go travelling. And yet it is emotionally true, and I think that is the power of literature and art. Whether it is Kafka, a Cancer Sun, or perhaps the writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra, who seems to have adapted this story and who has Venus and Mercury in Cancer, they both understand this principle deeply. I think they both understand the line from The Little Prince: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Key references
The Astrology of Fate — Liz Greene
The Inner Sky — Steven Forrest
What It’s Like for a Guy Ruminations On Sun-Sign Cancer By Glenn Perry https://aaperry.com/ruminations-on-sun-in-cancer/
Further reading
In Search of Lost Time — Marcel Proust
The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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