Cancer/Capricorn Coupling
These two signs have their origin in the solstices, the moments at which the two polarities of the solar life power are found in a condition of maximum disequilibrium. In Cancer the Day-force is at the acme of its power, even though the Night-force is by no means annihilated, and from then on it will slowly wax in strength. In Capricorn the Night-force is as dominant as it ever can be. Thus the characteristic features of one of these two forces are exaggerated and overemphasized in these zodiacal signs. This emphasis serves a basic purpose in the over-all pattern of the zodiacal cycle: one of the two polarities is revealed in all its implications and limitations.
In Cancer the Sun which had been moving northward in declination — that is, the sunsets had occurred for three months to the north of exact West—"stands still," which is what the word solstice etymologically means, sol being the Latin for Sun. This symbolizes an abrupt reversal of the process which had been going on for half a year. The Gemini eagerness for conquering more life space and increasing knowledge through all kinds of experiments stops. Symbolically speaking, the young man who had been scattering his energies experimenting with a multitude of things gets a job, marries and settles down to become the head of a family. In this sense, Cancer represents the stabilizing power of a home. Life energies are being focused; and a home can be a narrow and exclusivistic focus of attention, setting a well-defined stage for the birth and education of the child.
This focusing of energy can operate at several levels. Albert Einstein had a Cancer Ascendant. His ideas led to the concept of a finite spheroidal universe and he was concerned with the formulation of one basic principle encompassing all known manifestations of energy. Because the Cancer type strives for the concrete realization of Unity at the root of all modes of experience, it may be led to mystical realizations of a sort. The sign Cancer is often associated with psychic gifts, but the validity of this belief depends a great deal on what one means by psychic. Clairvoyance is usually a holistic process in which the essence and meaning of a situation as a whole is seen by the clairvoyant as a symbol or a scene. Characteristic here is the whole-making activity. Building a home — and not merely a physical house — is a whole-making activity. The bipolar couple, man-woman, is ideally a reconstituted whole, potentially procreative because stabilized as one single biological and social unit.
Capricorn also refers to the achievement of integration, but while Cancer refers to the narrow biopsychic unity of apersonal situation, Capricorn deals with the large-scale political or managerial institutions of a complex national state. Modern nations in most cases are not at first composed of people of the same race or culture; indeed, the purpose of a national state — at least spiritually speaking — is to integrate different races and cultures. The problems which all western nations have faced, and are still facing, arise from the fact that several distinct ethnic groups are made to interact and to cooperate in the establishment and above all the maintenance of a perfect union. France is a typical instance, but so is Great Britain, and of course in a special sense he United States.
A Cancer Ascendant will tend to make a person concerned with very definite, perhaps intellectually formulatable or experientially workable goals. The issues are sharply definable and involve individual personalities. A Capricorn Ascendant leads one to discover one's own essential identity and destiny in activities that involve the integration of distant factors or of basic antagonisms which can be integrated only by means of strictly logical systems or legalinstrumentalities requiring some type of police force to enforce patterns of order.
What is perhaps even more important is that the Cancer Ascendant person will trust more in the use of personal power and of the dynamic power of love, while the Capricorn Ascendant will resort to large impersonal or superpersonal concepts or techniques of organization. Carl Jung had a Capricorn Ascendant and his system of depth psychology stresses the idea that the power of archetypes of the collective unconscious is ultimately more important than that of strictly personal feelings or intellectual concepts. On the other hand, Adler, another psychologist who also left the Freudian school, had a Cancer Ascendant, and he emphasized the importance of purely personal reaction to some kind of handicap and the will-to-power which compensates for feelings of inferiority by expressing aggressivity.
The person with Cancer as rising sign will also use this process of personal compensation but primarily as he establishes associations with other people. He is afraid to meet them in a person-to-person interaction. He may hide under broad concepts and Capricornian social generalizations. He has to build a social persona, to play a role in which he can appear superior to other people; and clairvoyance may turn out to be quite a remarkable way of impressing the persons with whom one comes into relationship with one's superior faculty of perception, while at the same time one is inwardly painfully aware of one's own individual insecurity.
On the other hand, the person with a Capricorn Ascendant has need of people with whom he can relate person to person, for without such concretizing meetings and close interpersonal empathy he might feel personally over-involved in ambitious schemes and large-scale social planning, or in mystical and cosmic realizations. Capricorn can refer to experiences and faculties that many people would call "mystical," but the reference is rather to the type ofconsciousness that is able or desires intensely to operate in terms of a transcendent type of order, of a cosmic and — in the real sense of this much abused term — occult use of power. He may tend to overwhelm other people with such power, seeking potential subjects in order to fulfill what he considers his destiny. It could be a catabolic kind of destiny.
A fourth house with Cancer at its cusp indicates a human being in whom the archetypal characteristics associated with the number 4 in numerical symbolism — perhaps the most universal of all symbolic systems — are quite strong. This is because Cancer is also the fourth sign of the zodiac. Indeed, the often stressed identity of meaning attributed by astrologers to Cancer and the fourth house can only be justified on such a numerological basis. The number 4 is die symbol of concrete embodiment and of the most basic feelings associated with the operation of life energies and their psychic overtones — the basic drives studied by psychologists. This number defines the process of integration as it operates at the biopsychic level within human consciousness. It refers to the type of intelligence which works as the obedient servant of the life force in order to provide a secure foundation for the growth of personality — an intelligence whose operations are controlled by expediency, empiricism, and adaptation to concrete organic needs.This intelligence is related to the Moon in astrological symbolism, and the Moon is said to rule the sign Cancer. It refers to the mother only because it is the mother who cares for the baby incapable of meeting his own needs — the need for food, clothing, shelter, cleaning, and also for security and love.
A Cancerian fourth house refers therefore to the particularly strong and probably lifelong need of the individual to focus much of his attention upon his ability to adapt to changing conditions in his private life. This stresses the importance not only of the home life, but of all that refers to the process of personality integration. However, such a concentration upon the near at hand, the organic, the feelings, and upon some sort of Mother-image, could beoverwhelming if not integrated with what the Capricorn tenth house implies: that is, an equally strong concern for establishing oneself securely in a social position. The latter provides the social power, the money, necessary to run a secure, satisfying home.
When the situation is reversed, and Capricorn is found at the Nadir point of the chart, public concerns may well dominate a person's private life — that is, if no special planetary "influence" is at work in the fourth and the tenth houses. Professional or social activities, however, will tend to be determined by expediency. Indeed, the public or professional life should be managed with a keen sense of adjustment to the rapidly changing moods of thecommunity. If the individual identifies his own fourth house personality with a broad, social, or cosmic purpose — Capricorn — he will indeed need flexibility of response, a sense of timing, and a "psychic" feeling of what is vital and acceptable to his public in order to succeed. With such a position one most often finds a Libra Ascend-ant. This of course emphasizes the concern with social issues and values, and the ability to deal with groups — and in so dealingto discover one's own identity.