Cancer I: Before Sunrise

The Two of Cups

Gemini III ends in ruins. A false idol, dressed as confidence, finally undone. In the first decan of Cancer we take a left turn towards a liminal space–one that represents attraction’s first gaze. The summer solstice opens onto the Two of Cups, Venus ruling Cancer, the Moon’s domicile, it’s natural house. It’s the nicest placement for this ruler–one where she governs with ease. The Golden Dawn’s Book T title for this decan, “Lord of Love,” is apt. 

The Rider-Waite-Smith card features two figures facing each other. Each holds a cup, hands outstretched but neither has drunk yet. It’s a moment of anticipation. 

Two of Cups Rider Waite Smith Tarot Card

It’s that spark of attraction, the lightning bolt. That’s Mercury–represented by the caduceus behind the figures–bounding in at the speed of sight. That vision–Céline says it best in the movie Before Sunrise, on the train, before anything has happened between her and Jesse: I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away. 

While the pull to dissolve into one another is real, it’s not yet consummated. The figures holding the cups are extending the cards at the exact same level–the snakes of the caduceus never merge into one. There’s a distinct feeling of separation while moving closer (Susan Chang notes the sense of movement in her decan entries). M.M. Meleen’s entry on Cancer I notes that the Thoth deck replaces the imagery with dolphins (a Venusian symbol) intertwined–again, not merging. 

Behind them, the frame tells the same story at a different scale. Chang traces the water in these two majors as one continuous body — the waterfall behind the Empress feeding the river behind the Chariot, attraction running straight into willpower and action. The Empress card behind Venus opens onto forest — wild, uncultivated. The Chariot behind Cancer opens onto a walled city — built, defended, finished. Between those two extremes, the Two of Cups shows exactly one house, small, sitting on a hill, far enough off that you'd have to walk to reach it. A future that's visible from here, but the promise has not yet arrived. 

Cancer’s own animal, the crab, lives in this same sort of in-between. Traversing both the water and the land, it can’t survive in either state alone. It’s body requires both the land and the sea and it’s what this decan is really describing. The ability to move between both states (autonomous and coupled) isn’t a compromise–it’s a necessity. 

If you follow this path— past the initial states of lust to whatever comes next, the same shape holds. Attraction pulls two people toward each other. Something else has to keep pulling them back into themselves, or there's no longer a them left standing there, just one thing wearing two faces and a dysfunctional state of codependency. A relationship that survives past its first decan isn't one that finally completes the merger. It's one that keeps returning to the shoreline, in and out, coupled and singular, again and again, for as long as it lasts.