Cancer, the 4th House, and Flower Children

I’ve been reading a very good novel called Flower Children, by Maxine Swann. It’s about four children being raised by back-to-nature hippie parents in the early 1970’s in Pennsylvania. What makes the book so interesting are the complex thematic textures and conflicts. Does Utopian idealism prepare children for survival in the real world? What is the nature of the family—and is there ever such a thing as a “perfect family”?

The children in the novel, who are individuals and yet linked by the common bond of their family environment, learn certain ideas and values about life from their parents. They have never watched television, for example, and think nothing of nudity. When they enter school and encounter other children who have been raised more conventionally, they discover how exceptional they truly are and this further binds them to each other. Running through all this, as I read the book, is the inter-twining of family roots, the zodiac sign of Cancer, and the 4th house.
Cancer is ruled by the Moon, and it’s as though the children of Flower Children collectively have Uranus on the cusp of the 4th house or Uranus conjunct their composite Moon.

Cancer can signify more than just our family and home. It is associated with the 4th house, and Dane Rudhyar, in his book on the twelve houses (The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience), relates the 4th house to the center of the globe of the Earth: “In the fourth house the person can and should reach the experience of center—the center of his own global, total personality as well as the center of global humanity, of a firmly established and concretely real brotherhood of man.”

It takes a great deal of courage and effort to expand our experience beyond just the family of origin to encompass the greater human family. The Dalai Lama is a Cancer Sun, as were Princess Diana and Henry Thoreau.

Cancer is a crab in a protective shell. It tends to move sideways, or at least diagonally, getting at things and people indirectly. This seems to be a fitting description of many adults who have learned to self-protect in a threatening world. You don’t have to have any planets in Cancer to do that, and we all have Cancer somewhere in our horoscope, as well as a 4th house. Perhaps that slight sideways movement, a cautionary emotional sidestep as we meet strangers, is Cancer—our family, our childhood, like a vestigial first step into kindergarten where we feel a parent’s hand press ours and then let go, leaving us to step…sideways, gingerly, feeling awkwardly for an uncertain safety and security.

The United States is a Cancer Sun (as well as a Cancer Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter)—and I can’t imagine another country that espouses more (mostly hypocritical) verbiage about “family values,” as witnessed by the recently aired business involving a “family values” Republican senator and a call girl service. I live not far from Los Angeles, where the mayor—who portrayed himself during a recent election as a devoted family man—has been caught having an extra-marital affair with a local news anchor. I don’t want to get too judgmental about all this, but family values are indeed relative.

Jessica Murray, in her excellent book Soul-Sick Nation—which I’ve also been reading—discusses the U.S. Cancer Sun: “…as an unconscious water sign, its central impulses are also darkly primitive, fed by the Mother/Child archetype. This suggests that the world’s great superpower is actually driven by the fears and yearnings of an ingenuous child, one who is all bound up in its own safety and comfort.”

Sideways was the title of a movie of a couple of years ago. It was about two adolescent 30-something men who go on a Central California wine tasting tour. After seeing the movie, I puzzled over the significance of the title. The ad for the movie showed a wine glass tipped sideways. However, the movie was very Cancerian. At least that's my sideways interpretation, although I doubt it was the film mker's. Paul Giamatti played the part of a walking mid-life crisis named Miles. His movements were crablike, hunched down slightly and walking with sideways steps—sometimes the result of drinking, but it was also just the character’s nature. He grasped the world around him with emotional pinot pincers and would not let go.

In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem about the shadow side of watery Cancer--which ends with the words "and we drown"--T.S. Eliot wrote the memorable lines,

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.