In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about the Cancer Archetype (from the Zodiac archetypes).
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What is the Cancer Archetype?
Cancer quintessentially translates to nourishing, healing, protection, and the setting up of roots. Through the sensitive attunement of feeling, imagination, and emotion, Cancer exudes healing energy to the outside world. Cancer signifies a mother who keeps families together and caters for the needs of others. The outward style of expression of Cancer enables it to nurture and heal limitlessly.
Those who have their planets in Cancer have that unique ability that mothers have of foresight, expressed by emotional contours and feelings. Even when far apart, they will feel when a person is suffering or is in pain. Out of the three water element symbols, Cancer is the creator and activator of imagination and also the leader when it comes to expressing emotion. They may be more old-fashioned, but they are deeply devoted to those they love and an open-minded person to everything in life.
In essence, Cancer is all about attaching the living intuitive flow of love (LIFE) and opening up the heart to feel all dimensions relating to the human experience. In this case, the soul is alive and the heart is soothed as individuals are empowered to forgive one another. Cancer demonstrates that at the focal point of being is a temple of holy existence where you can converse with divinity. Tap into it and you’ll find compassion for all beings.
The Moon and Cancer represent the formation of physical home and the spiritual hearth of the soul that I Prefer to term as the Well of Being. Nadir or the 4th house is the field of life experience relating to this inner well that surrounds the underground ancestral river of memory. It connects us with traditions that have been passed down. Cancer manages emotional healing and well being.
Our families and homes provide us with nourishment and a source of protection. Home is where your soul is fed with hour upon hour of bliss reflection. It instils us with emotional security and a feeling of safety. After leaving it, there’s a psychic cord that always links us back to the place where we love, eat, and dream. Homes comprise chambers such as the shell of a crab that we reside and share our lives with others, inviting them to the table of our hearths. Empathic Cancer encourages you to heal, protect, nurture and also teaches us to open our hearts more in the field of life experience.
The house that has Cancer at the border is where you need to be a source of support, forgiveness, and soulful yearning. The same case applies to the House containing the Moon, the soul of the chart. It is within those domains of life experience that you exhibit to others how to create imagination and navigate emotion. Imagination becomes rigid if the soul isn’t nourished.
Cancer runs our souls’ emotional field, abdomen, breasts, and stomach. Put your hand on your tummy and feel the softness, where food is typically digested. The mother gives life to a baby through her soft breasts. Cancer runs the milk of life. When you have something bad happen to you, the natural response is curling our bodies inwards to a familiar fetal position. We may also place our hands over our stomachs when we get a bad feeling.
When your Cancer energy gets misguided, you become unaware of all needs. Then you start becoming extremely hysterical, snobby, and full of fear and worry. Misplaced emotional over-protectiveness, Cancer’s shadow materializes making you irrational and irritable. You tend to get self-indulgent and may drink or eat just to feel safe like when you were a child. A lack of sensitivity and insecurity is the symbol of Cancer depleted and lonely. You can overcome that shadow by expressing the contrasting symbol Capricorn, which is more about gaining responsibility, discipline, and wisdom.
The phrase Protective appears on both the dark and light sides of Cancer. Generally, Cancerians are excellent protectors, but upon becoming worried and insecure about matters, they get extremely over-protective. This over-protectiveness fuels guilt trips and emotional manipulation directed at the very people they supposedly love and care for.
All in all, the spiritual aspect of Cancer is compassion, recognizing that individuals can be the best they can within the parameters of their education, upbringing, and current awareness. This includes those you see as enemies. You can be compassionate to everybody if you choose to. The best strategy is responding to destructive behavior with forgiveness and love instead. That is the warm essence of Cancer’s compassion.
Cancer’s Glyph depicts a mother nurturing her child at her bosom, a perfect example of two souls in union. Just like a crab’s pincers, the two arcs of consciousness and heart receptivity extend from the centers of the two people, showing familial bonds. The sign shows the unity of life. As it continues to expand and rotate, it invites us to be free-willed and open our hearts more to unconditional love and also accept human differences and frailties not as weaknesses, but as special qualities and great patterns of diversity.
Learn About the Other Zodiac Archetypes
The Zodiac is made up of 12 archetypes. Explore the others here:
