This is a difficult question, because it is quite impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them than on the mainland.
Because the Crab and the Water Bearer are influenced by the 6-8 Sun Sign vibration, Aquarius finds Cancer helpful in some way, and Cancer finds Aquarius mystifying in some way. Of course, Cancer isn’t alone in that outlook. Everyone finds Aquarius mystifying. It’s just that Cancer finds Aquarius even more mystifying than the rest of us do, because Aquarius represents the eighth astrological house to Cancer. This means the Crabs look upon the Water Bearers more or less the way Aries people look upon Scorpio, as Taurus people look upon Sag, as Gemini people look upon Cappy, and so forth. It’s all relative.
At first glance, it may appear that these two share nothing at all, making it difficult for them to relate to each other. But think about it a little longer. Take, for example, Mother Goose (Cancer) and Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter (Aquarius). Can you see where they might have something in common? They unquestionably share the quality of—strangeness. The abstract.
However, Aquarius is strange in a sudden, shocking and unconventional way, and Cancer is strange in a moody, dreamlike way. Although Crabs are undeniably outwardly quite practical, there is this elusive essence of changeability and unpredictability about them. This they also have in common with Aquarius, but what counts is the difference in the manner in which the quality is manifested. The changeability of the Crabs is synchronized to the changes of the Moon, timed to the Lunar phases, as simple as that. So it’s somewhat easier to keep a daily log on their mood switches. One just jots it down neatly in a ledger, you know, under Full Moon (weird and weepy)—New Moon (restless and imaginative)—Quarter Moon (nostalgic and homesick)—Three-Quarter Moon (funny and lovable)—Waning Periods (cranky and crabby)—Waxing Periods (aggressive and hungry)—or Eclipses (pouting and reclusive). The trouble is, sometimes Cancerians mix up their moods, and one then has to observe that it’s the Full Moon when they’re funny and lovable, whereas the New Moon brings on nostalgia, or they’ll pop out of the basement during the Three-Quarter, and become aggressive during an Eclipse. One needs a ledger book with several columns, also perhaps a blue and red pen for the switchovers, and even then, it requires a great deal of concentration to keep the columns straight, should they happen to stick to the crabby crankiness during the Waning, but reverse the weird and weepy to the Quarter Moon. But for all that, the Crab’s moods and changes are rather more easy to prognosticate than those of your typical Water Bearer.
You see, Aquarian changeability and unpredictable behavior are timed to the lightning flashes of Uranus, and I really don’t know of anyone, including Tom Edison, Ben Franklin and Nicola Tesla, who ever found a way to predict lightning flashes with enough accuracy to log them in a ledger. One minute the sky is clear-blue milk glass, and a split second later, there’s this zigzag streak of forked yellow fire cutting through the clouds, followed by the most awful rumble, then a sudden noisy clap of thunder. Consequently, as intricate as the Lunar Ledger accounting may be, the Uranus Lightning Ledger accounting is simply impossible to keep straight. Actually, I believe the less traumatic way would be for the Crab and the Water Bearer to play it by ear. I mean, taking everything into consideration, you know? By now, you’ve probably comprehended that this association, while it can no doubt be puzzling for both people, is highly unlikely to be boring for either.
Perhaps because the Crabs are such great reactors, their emotional needs capable of leaping to such heights and plunging to such depths, Aquarians think it’s fun to play little tricks on them, to surprise them when they’re least expecting it. The Water Bearers may pull their surprise numbers on Cancerians at any age, beginning quite young, sometimes even before they’re born—although, typically Uranus-like, they nearly always give a subtle hint of the coming caper, which the Crab almost never picks up but which makes the Aquarians feel better because, after all, they did try to warn you, and you paid no attention. (Aquarians hate to do anything dishonest or hypocritical.)
For example, Jennifer H. Smith was about to become a mother for the very first time. Jennifer is a Cancerian Moon Maid, so you can well imagine the event was enthusiastically anticipated, Cancer being the sign of Motherhood, and having babies naturally being the big thing it is to women, but especially to female Crabs. The obstetrician informed Jennifer and her husband, Bill, that the baby would arrive on March 28. Mothers always believe their obstetricians (Cancerian mothers even more because they tend to be shy, and not apt to talk back), although one wonders why they’re so gullible, since doctors calculate the date of birth correctly roughly only somewhere below 2 percent of the time, and their batting average is even lower than that on the first baby.
So here they were, poor Jennifer and Bill, expecting an Aries infant, which of course meant preparing for substantially more screaming demands for clean panties and warm bottles at odd hours during the night because, although all infants are demanding to a degree, Aries infants are selfish beyond belief when it comes to not caring whether their parents sleep or not until their howling needs are fulfilled. They are feisty little bundles from Heaven, the ones who arrive by way of Mars, but irresistible all the same.
The problem was that the doctor and the parents were figuring the wrong Sun Sign. Only the baby himself was aware that he was an Aquarian. He tried to warn them before he pulled his surprise, but no, they paid no attention and insisted on checking with the doctor and calendars and such, instead of with the San Diego Public Library, where the truth waited for them. Now, you may think the public library a very odd place to go to learn the date of birth of an expected infant, but to an Aquarian, it’s all quite logical.
Water Bearer Bobby Smith arrived, not on March 28, but precisely on his own Uranus schedule, of February 3, nearly two months early, and weighing in at 5 pounds, 6 ounces—and no, little Bobby was not a premature baby. He was a perfectly healthy and well-formed (if tiny) full-term infant, who had no intention of timing his entrance into this world to suit anyone’s mistaken calculations, and thereby depriving himself of his Aquarian Sun Sign.
But as I said, Aquarian Bobby tried to warn his Cancerian mother. On her hurried departure from the house, on the way to the hospital—when it became evident that, calendar or no calendar, doctor or no doctor, Bobby was definitely arriving—Jennifer passed the hall table, on which lay a library book, with the cover open. But did she see it? No. It wasn’t until she returned home with her baby son in her arms that she glanced at her warning. Stamped in large purple letters on the card in the book, was the telegram from Uranus, as clear and distinct as could be: DUE DATE: February 3.
Regardless of the relationship between Cancer and Aquarius, whether the two of them are relatives, friends, business associates, lovers or mates—whether the Cancerian is a male Crab or a female Crab, and whether the Water Bearer is male, female or any other sex—the Aquarian will, from time to time, play these little tricks on the Moon person, just to watch the Lunar reaction. Cancerian features are so elastic, it’s like watching a movie of Life to observe the expressions that pass across them—joy, sorrow, laughter, suspicion, secrecy, fear, anger, tenderness, hope, despair, expectancy—the entire gamut of human emotions. Tears, then giggles. Laughter, then sobs. Crankiness, then gentle sweetness. Softness, then crabby snapping. The Water Bearers thoroughly enjoy it all. But there’s one Cancer mood they won’t enjoy. The Crab’s sometimes exaggerated sense of personal privacy. Aquarians have nothing to hide, and they can’t comprehend why the Crabs are so unnecessarily suspicious and self-protective. These two may sometimes need a brief vacation from each other when one’s eccentricities begin to grate on the other’s nerves.
A male Cancerian and male Water Bearer I know, who were very close friends in New York, decided to share a house for a few months in California, while the Aquarian was checking out a college to see if it deserved being honored by his enrollment. His Cancerian buddy had a habit of locking his own room when he left the house. No reflection on his Uranus friend’s honesty, but Crabs just have this sometimes slightly neurotic compulsion for secrecy. The Aquarian merely shrugged. The idiosyncrasies of their friends never trouble or surprise the Water Bearers. Live and let live is their motto. However, one night the Crab made the mistake of locking the Aquarian’s guitar and tennis racquet in his (the Cancer’s) room before he went to a movie. When Aquarius came home and wanted to practice some songs, then play a set of tennis, and realized his equipment had been locked up, he exploded into a lightning streak of Uranus anger, pried open a window and made a forced entry to recover his belongings.
Outraged when he returned to find his room broken into, the Crab called the police. It nearly destroyed the friendship between them, but fortunately, they talked it over and parted with a handshake—although the Aquarian wisely moved out the next day, before the Cancerian’s period of pouting over the incident made him say things that would have wounded the sensitive Lunar one too deeply to ever be forgotten. They’ll pick up their friendship someday again, where it left off. But the moral of the story is that these two Sun Signs shouldn’t press each other too far. A breathing spell apart periodically is helpful.
Cancer intensely resents the Aquarian inquisitiveness and blunt speech. Aquarius intensely resents Cancer’s reticence and tendency to pout. Yet the Water Bearer will become cross himself (or herself) when the Crab is moody, eccentric and unpredictable. Then the Crab could very well retort, justifiably, Look who’s complaining about mood changes, eccentricity and unpredictable behavior! Unfortunately, however, Aquarians never see themselves as strange in any way. The whole world is crazy, and everyone in it is crazy, but they are as normal as can be. Aquarius is a Fixed sign, don’t forget. Cancer is Cardinal. Therefore, Cancer will make every possible attempt to lead Aquarius, while Aquarius makes every possible attempt not to be led. That’s what Cardinal means and that’s what Fixed means. The sum total is…. well, I do hate to be redundant, but it’s unpredictable.
The most common mistake made in an association between the Moon-ruled and the Uranus-ruled is the tendency of the Crab to try every sort of strategic maneuver (most of them sly and secret) to get the Water Bearer to come around to the Cancerian point of view. It takes a while to learn that the devil and forty horsemen could not persuade a Uranus individual to do anything he-she does not wish to do. You can make that the devil and ninety horsemen, if you wish. Throw in the entire Marine Corps. If the Water Bearer has other ideas, the Crab is nearly always wasting time, and Cancerians should make note of this, because they do not like to waste time any more than they like to waste money. Still, there’s always the unexpected, unpredictable outcome, when the Aquarian is cajoled or wheedled or softly pressed into submission, and the rare instances of this phenomenon will invariably be due to the Crab’s truly amazing tenacity. When a Crab grabs anything or anyone with that claw of persistence, it’s no easy task to work loose from the grip.
The eating habits of these two are often vastly different. Many Aquarians enjoy snacks like frozen bananas dipped in chopped liver, tomatoes stuffed with pinto beans—and baked dandelions. Cancerians prefer more nourishing dishes like Mama used to make and stuff into their ecstatic tummies. The formula Aquarius must remember if he-she wants to keep the Crab happy is: lots of love—lots of food—lots of money—and simply oodles of sympathetic listening.
If the Crabs care to be given the secret of success in achieving harmony with the Water Bearers, here it is (but don’t tell anyone—shhh!). Mind your own business—don’t gossip—don’t nag—don’t ask questions—and be prepared to remind them of their names and addresses now and then, when they absentmindedly forget such small matters. If they both practice these formulas, they should get along quite nicely with each other.
When the Crab is lonesome and moonsick (which is very much like homesick, only much more so), the Water Bearer should cheerfully call out, Hey! You want to play marbles with jelly beans? That’s all it takes to make most sad Looney Birds smile—the mention of yum-yums. And the memory of fun at recess, in the good old days long, long ago, when Life was nice and safe and secure and cozy…. when Mama tucked them in at night, and always had a hanky handy to dry the tears shed over their Lunar fears.
Cancer Woman and Aquarius Man
But Wendy noticed, with gentle concern, that Peter did not seem to know that this was rather an odd way of earning your bread and butter, nor even that there are other ways ………. Wendy would have preferred a more permanent arrangement.
An Aquarian man longs for affection just like anyone else, but he’ll struggle violently against being dunked, like a donut, in an ocean of it. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that people don’t dunk donuts in the ocean. Aquarius does. He doesn’t eat the donut after it’s dunked. He’s just experimenting with how fast the salt water makes it soggy, compared with the honey in his tea. But the important thing is that he, himself, is uncomfortable in a soggy state. Too much soggy possessiveness stifles his need for the fresh air of freedom of expression.
The typical Water Bearer will resent being interrogated about wearing his galoshes, how many starches he’s eating and what he did with the thirty-five dollars he had in his pocket yesterday. He’ll certainly appreciate the flattering attention he receives from the Moon Maiden, but when that attention threatens to curb his independent research of the world and nearly everyone in it, he’ll become stubborn—or he’ll clam up and coast away.
Telling this man what time to be home is rather futile. He needs to fly free, and he can do without being dampened by Saturnine pessimism while he’s flying. His odd behavior may perplex the Cancerian woman into tears. He’ll often act as though he doesn’t even know she’s there, let alone that she’s weeping— then if she’s missing at the very moment he wants a baked Alaska, or has lost a shoestring and needs her to find it, he’ll be more than a little upset. It’s her fault. She’s the one who got him accustomed to her baked Alaskas and steamed veggies, and she’s spoiled him equally in the shoestring department. It also disturbs her when he tries to pry into her secrets. Even when she has no secrets. Sometimes she’s just quiet for no reason, her thoughts racing with the Moon, and he tries to race along beside her. But she’d really rather be alone on such flights—or at least she needs her companion to hold her hand in silent sympathy, not startle her with questions that sound like popcorn …. popping in her inner ear when she’s half-dreaming.
You can see that each of them prefers that the other doesn’t intrude upon his (or her) flying habits. Joining is all right, but not interfering. If she can learn not to try to restrict his urges to mingle with the masses and hike alone now and then—and he can learn to pry more gently into her secret place of dreams—at least half of their troubles will have been overcome.
A Lunar lady has a near compulsion to mother the man she loves. This man will think it’s neat to be mothered, at any chronological age at all, but she should be warned that mothering an Aquarian male can be a full-time job—at any age. Maybe they’re both high school or college students. If so, here are some hints. A young Aquarian I know, named Bill, during a couple of reasonably recent years, decided to be an oceanographer, then a musician, then an engineer, then a scuba diver, then an astronaut—for a brief period, a Lutheran minister—and most recently, he’s waiting to talk with a Leo biologist, whom he happens to respect, so he can help him decide if he should settle on marine biology as a career. He’s a little jumpy, waiting, because the biologist advisor is temporarily residing in Hawaii. During roughly the same period of time, this Water Bearer lost four pairs of glasses, three pairs of contact lenses, had an emergency appendectomy, disappeared from home for eight weeks to work in a pizza parlor, took up playing the guitar for church services, grew his hair long, cut his hair short, painted the ceiling of his room jet black—and fell in love with a female fish named Debbie. (No one has been able to find out if Debbie is a female Piscean or a marlin at the New York aquarium.)
Last month (as I write this) he decided to join a friend in Dayton, Ohio, in opening a shop to repair and build guitars—shortly after which he decided to join a rock band on tour, while waiting to talk with the temporarily Hawaii-based biologist about dolphins and such. He has it somewhere in the back of his mind to learn how to speak dolphin. I haven’t the slightest idea what that means, have you? A telephone call in the midst of writing this paragraph only minutes ago informed me that he changed his mind, and is now planning a hermit period in the woods, for the purpose of meditating alone and composing some music. However, he’s not sure it’s the Colorado woods he wants to camp out in, because Colorado only has two kinds of trees, two kinds of flowers, two kinds of rocks—and this is beginning to bore him. He’d like to try playing his guitar in the Grand Canyon, he says, and tape the echoes.
Do you see what I mean?
That’s the kind of thing the Moon Maiden will face, regardless of the calendar age of the Uranus man. Oh, he may have a more or less (mostly less) permanent job or career, and all that—and he may not have lost his glasses (only because he doesn’t wear glasses, in which case, he’ll lose other things, like his driver’s license or his bankbook, keys—assorted objects of that nature). Whether this man is five or fifty, twenty or two hundred, he needs a lot of mothering. Just so the Moon Maid who loves him doesn’t get the word mothering confused with the word smothering.
The Cancer lady who has chaotically cast herself within the general auric orb of the Water Bearer should resign herself to skipping through Wonderland with him, if not geographically, then at least mentally. If not mentally, then emotionally. If she’s lucky, it will be all three. Actually, when it’s analyzed carefully, it doesn’t make all that much difference whether her attitude toward his comings and goings with his many friends (who sort of grow on him, like benevolent barnacles) is strict or permissive, since neither attitude will make much impression on him. His family probably tried both, and found out years before the Moon lady met him that neither method was overwhelmingly successful, as far as keeping him walking an arrow-straight path, without curves and detours, was concerned. Aquarians must, in some manner, zigzag. It’s their empathy with the symbolic Uranus lightning. Everyone knows lightning never follows a straight line, so how can one expect a man who is under its influence to do so himself?
Oddly, the older an Aquarian man grows, the more Fixed his habits become, very gradually—yet the older a Cancerian woman grows, the more wistful she often becomes about visiting those faraway places of her girlhood dreams. It’s a situation calling for compromise. I don’t want to mislead the Moon Maid. When I said the Uranus male changes as he grows older, I didn’t mean to leave the impression that he’ll ever become quite as normal as the neighbors. He’ll still remain a little wacky, he’ll just be a touch more Fixed in his wackiness. Like he may not mow the back lawn in his birthday suit anymore, but his sense of the original and the unique will stay relatively intact. In however mild a manner, he’ll still manage to come up with occasional surprises to keep life interesting.
There will be times when she thinks he verges on peculiar, but usually the female Crab will find the Water Bearer lots of fun. Her sense of humor is one of her lunier and lovelier traits, and might even be what attracted him to her in the first place. (Since she has a feeling for the ridiculous, her feeling for him is certainly logical enough.) He loves the way her smile ripples like a quiet stream, then bursts into a waterfall of merry, madcap laughter. And undeniably, her feminine secrecy intrigues him. Her moods may puzzle, even madden, him, at times, but if he really tries, he can synchronize his metabolism to hers. After all, he’s a mental Air Sign and therefore more adaptable than lots of other people. It’s the Fixity of his sign that could require some shaking up.
This being a 6-8 Sun Sign Pattern, she represents the sixth astrological house of service to him so there’s always the chance that if she permits it, he’ll fall into the habit of expecting her to serve him in subtle ways, or to sacrifice her own dreams to his changeable charisma. He represents the eighth house vibration to her; consequently, he’ll seem, in some way, elusive, just beyond her grasp somehow…. and she’ll also find him physically appealing in a way she can’t easily explain.
There’s an undeniable sexual attraction between these two. A powerful chemistry draws them from the beginning. For he was born under a masculine sign, ruled by the also masculine Uranus—she was born under a feminine sign, ruled by the also very feminine Moon. Never mind the old rumors about the Man in the Moon—the inconstant Moon is definitely a lady. Astrology’s warning to the double masculine men and double feminine women is to beware of the natural tendency for the strong to domineer the allegedly weak, bringing with it the danger of a trace of the sadistic and the masochistic. But there’s more likelihood in this case that the roles could be reversed, because the double feminine influence of the Moon Maid is also Cardinal. She may appear to be a submissive angel of docility, but I wouldn’t take any bets on who rules the roost if I were you. Of course, an Aquarian man will be ruled just so long, then leave the roost. (Fly the coop.)
However, if she can blend her feminine qualities with his masculine ones, and vice versa, so that each contains a happy combination of negative-positive in his or her approach to life and to each other…. especially in their approach to sex … they’ll enjoy their lovemaking immensely, because it will bring them such peace and contentment. It’s a rare Moon Maiden and Water Bearer who don’t value their sexual union as a very special experience. She brings out in him a depth of tenderness he might not have known he possessed. And he arouses in her a wildness of passion she kept hidden, until him, like a touch of abandoned Moon madness.
Uranus, the alchemist, helps him translate her moods unexpectedly, and he somehow knows the singing words to transmute them too … from reflective to intense … from sad to serene … from dull despair to the dizzy heights of fresh hope and Lunar laughter. He murmurs a magic mantra to her with a single glance, like a lightning bolt. She hears it … as the Full Moon hears the thunderous sound of silently swelling, gathering waves long before they crash against the ocean’s shore … and she answers with a matching glance. No wonder their sexual Oneness is unique and unpredictable, potentially so deep and fulfilling, especially when their Luminaries are in harmony between their birth charts.
These two will constantly challenge each other in strange and haunted ways, inexplicably interwoven with the powerfully magnetic vibrations of the Moon and Uranus … through the eloquence of unspoken messages in their eyes. Neither of them is above using a spell to bind the other. He’ll think he can escape, but her delicate mist holds him with its beckoning secrets, as her eyes seem to chant the incantation of a Moon Child …. Abracadabra, rippled water tears … pickled pumpkin butterfly ears … North Winds, blow across his years …..<a href=#filepos1880420″>*
She’ll think she can run away from the sometimes pain of love, but he’ll hold her fast with the sheer compulsion of his indefinable mystery, silently warning her that, if she goes ….. I’ll leave my trace upon you … like your own witch’s hex … streaked through your hair … and lingering in your silver eyes …*
Then he, in turn, will ponder leaving her, but she’ll reply softly … Oh, no! I’ll have my madcap moonlight way… MOmatter how many fiddlers call you to a dance of wooden marchers.And womanlike, she’ll have the last word. All his Uranus alchemy will be helpless to enable him to conjure up an answer to her final Cancer-Cardinal-Lunar-Feminine enchantment when she wraps him tenderly, but tightly, with the vow….
I’ll sear your palm with an eternal scar
so all the canny Cassandras will whisper
Ah! There goes one of the lost!
he has been visited by a vagrant solitaire
singing a moonlight sonata
he has been wheedled by a will-o’-the-wisp
from the midnight moors
he has been kissed by a flickering firefly
brushed by the touch of a wild gypsy spell
he has heard the cry of a loon
… he has been loved
It’s never easy to leave a Cancerian lady. Her violet songs will follow the Aquarian man wherever he goes, and however far … even tinting his dreams with lavender and the shimmering silver of her laugh. His friends will think he’s even stranger than before … and that’s pretty strange! But also rather wonderful. It’s uncommonly rare to be enchanted by a moonbeam … to be a curious prisoner of the sea. It serves him right for being an Air Sign … and confusing her with his symbol of the Water Bearer. Poetic Justice, astrology would call it.
Cancer Man and Aquarius Woman
So this was the truth about mothers. The toads!
… he was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who as usual were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree, he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there was a saying in the Neverland that everytime you breathe a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them off as fast as possible.
Wendy melted …
The first mistake an Aquarian woman can make with a Cancer man is to try to jolly him out of his attachment to the memories of home and mother with the Aquarian’s sensible attitude that yesterday is past, today is unimportant—and he ought to be mature enough to realize that all important matters lie in the future, not in emotionally clinging to what is gone and can never return in quite the same shape or form. She may even go as far as to tell him to grow up. (Aquarians are not renowned for their tact, being very much like Archers in respect of a tendency toward blunt speech.)
The Crab will intensely resent her attempt to mature his emotional outlook. He may even snap at her, climb inside his cozy tree of memory and never come back out—until he’s sure she’s not around to hassle and hurt and frustrate him with her jolting, bolting Uranian thunderbolts of realism. It’s … well, it’s frightening. It makes him very, very lonely to discover that the woman he loves has no compassion for his nostalgic need to occasionally drift back to the safe, secure days of childhood when he’s particularly upset by the harshness of the world, the uncaring attitude of his friends and associates. He never really wanted to become an adult. Like Geminis, deep inside, every Cancerian man, regardless of his age or material success, secretly wishes he could have remained a boy. When he was a boy, there were so many wonders over which to marvel … so many things that made him both weep and giggle. And he enjoys surrendering himself to the extremes of the emotional gamut. It somehow seems to loosen his imagination, allowing it to take him on marvelous trips of fancy, like a private flying carpet, woven of dreams.
Stuffy, he’ll tell himself. That’s what she is. Stuffy. She has no imagination, he decides. She thinks and talks like a man. Acts like one too. Well, he’s not looking to fall in love with a masculine realist. He’s looking to fall in love with a dear, sweet, feminine creature of perfection like Mama.
He is wrong, of course. The very last thing this woman should be accused of is stuffiness. But that just happens to be the Crab’s favorite word (next to cruel) for the woman who won’t cry with him and laugh with him, who refuses to synchronize herself to his own fluctuating moods. As I’ve said before, in other Aquarian chapters of this book, the Uranus-ruled have an odd habit of weeping when they’re overjoyed and laughing crazily when they’re broken-hearted. It will take the Cancerian man some time to comprehend this—not to mention his difficulty in learning how to handle her reverse switches of disposition, from tomboy to princess, from gentle and languid to brisk and abrupt. Serves him right, really. He’s so moody himself. With this woman, he’ll be forced to swallow his own moody medicine. She’s quite changeable, her whims and fancies even more unpredictable than his own. They’re a motley couple, to be sure.
The Aquarian female isn’t lacking in sympathy, but she does tend to scatter it around in the direction of major humanitarian concerns, and sometimes forgets to save enough for her personal relationships. But she isn’t heartless, and she does have feelings. When she realizes the hurt she’s causing in the gentle Cancerian man she loves, she’ll do her best to make it up to him, to show him she really does care about him. The problem lies in the ways she chooses to demonstrate her loving devotion and regard for her friend. (Everyone is her friend including her lover or husband. Is there a difference? If so, she finds it difficult to draw the line.)
She could, for example, coax him to join her and her several dozen other friends on a picnic in a tree house. She might hang a bunch of balloons over the dining room table some morning to surprise him at breakfast—and serve him a bowl of Grapenuts with little toy caterpillars on the top, arranged in the shape of a heart. (She won’t tell him they aren’t real, the caterpillars, until he’s already turned pale.) Or she could show her affection by confiding in him her private yearning to go to India and decorate the Taj Mahal with little decals of forget-me-nots and violets at midnight, when the guards aren’t looking. She’s convinced the sentimental emperor who built it as a memorial to his love for his wife would be pleased. Good gawd! he’ll exclaim, that’s against the law! Crabs, like Goats and Bulls, are usually very reluctant to break the law or shatter tradition, whereas most Aquarians delight in breaking every law and dancing upon tradition. Even the rare shy Aquarians at least daydream about flouting the rules.
All these gestures of tenderness from his Water Bearer might give the Lunar man a case of the shingles from pure nervous apprehension. But she’s trying. Can’t he at least give her credit for trying? He may. He may force himself to make a supreme effort and give this fascinating lady of the exciting mental architecture credit for trying. However, he may regret giving her other forms of credit. Like a joint checking account. The typical Aquarian way of balancing a checkbook follows the general outline of the way a clown juggles colored balls at the circus—in a kind of rotating, circular motion. He’ll be dismayed. Cancerians are normally nearly neurotically fussy when it comes to anything pertaining to cash outlay and inlay. Income and outgo. It’s all the same to Cancer. Watch it. Carefully. In view of how fussy he is about money, what right does he have to call her fussy? None.
She fell in love with him in the first place because she heard somewhere that Cancerians are lovable Looney Birds, and she’s always been attracted toward anything with the word looney in it. (Anything or anyone.) This is why his marvelous sense of humor may save the day for these two. During certain phases of the Moon and the retrograde motion of Uranus, it blends beautifully with her sense of the zany and the ridiculous. Like sex.
When she was climbing up the Aquarian beanstalk of girlhood into womanhood, she thought sex was rather funny. After she became a woman she thought it was hilarious. She still thinks it’s somewhat of an odd way for a man and a woman to express their need for each other—when, after all, they could be proving their mutual love by collecting money to build a museum to a good cause. or running barefoot through a field of wild flowers (being careful not to smash any petals, which of course means running an inch or so off the ground), adopting all the starving babies in third world countries, lobbying in Washington for Congress to pass a law that everyone has to drive on the left-hand side of the street as they do in England, because that makes a whole lot more sense to her. He’ll go along with her concern for worldwide hunger and safe cars, but he won’t understand her leftish notions about driving and other matters (although he might wistfully dream of levitating a fraction of an inch over the field of jonquils). Still, he won’t allow these things to take priority over their physical closeness. The only thing he ever allows to take priority over affection and lovemaking is perhaps money—at odd times. Occasionally, also at even times.
Once she’s resigned herself to the recognition that sex is a necessity for total fulfillment between a man and a woman, she’ll thoroughly enjoy it, especially with her tender Crab. Unless they’re afflicted with a mutual square or opposition between Ascendents and Luminaries in their nativities, this man and woman will each answer the other’s silent call for the misty and the strange in their physical expression of love. They’re both a little haunted by various forms of the fey and the far-out, this being a shimmering link between them that frequently flashes with the brilliant colors of ecstasy and passion known only to those who allow their imaginations to guide their intimacies.
Gradually, he’ll discover that he was wrong about her lack of perception. She just appeared not to understand his deeper longings. In truth, she may be one of the very few people who’s ever been able to see beneath his Crab shell, his outward pose of respectability and seriousness, to the fanciful, gentle soul beneath the crusty exterior. It will surprise him when he learns this. She’s full of surprises … she vibrates to the unexpected. And her very unpredictability is what will eventually endear her to this man, who hates sameness and monotony as much as she does. His business associates will never guess this, but she won’t have to guess. She’ll know. His air of mothballs and his often courtly, old-fashioned manner won’t fool her for an instant. She knows he’d like to escape with her … to some faraway place where there are cool waterfalls and quiet woods. This instinctive Nature feeling permeates their lovemaking, often causing their sexual union to be as soothing as a midsummer night’s breeze. (Until the Puckish mischief in her emerges, and she slips into bed beside him some night, wearing around her neck a collar of antique sleigh bells, engraved with the date they first met—her surprise birthday gift to him.)
The explosives in their relationship will nearly always be labeled Cardinal and Fixed. He’s Cardinal, and will insist on leading, however soft his manner, however apparently (and deceptively) passive his surface personality may be. She’s Fixed, and will absolutely refuse to be dominated or guided. When she’s allowed to follow her own winding and twisting path, she’ll remain cheerful and light hearted. But each time he tries to change her direction or direct her course, she’ll become immovably stubborn, and either disappear into detachment or erupt into a Uranian electrical storm of anger. Her sudden spells of fury won’t last long, if she’s left alone to heal her injured spirit and is not nagged by the Crab. But if he continues to try to curb her freedom, her behavior will grow more and more unreasonable. There’s no use trying to confine her Air Element essence into a definite shape, and the sooner he learns this, the sooner harmony will be restored between them.
As for her, she’ll have to remember that while she’s excitedly traveling into tomorrow’s strange, new promise, he can’t help lingering behind, glancing over his shoulder toward yesterday’s familiar guarantee. The only way she can coax her Lunar-haunted man to catch up with her is to make him know that just beyond the horizon is a brighter star than he ever dared to wish on before. She should also not pry into his secrets—and stop ringing her sleigh bells when he’s dreaming. Or at least mute them just a mite.
| Cancer | Pisces |
| Water—Cardinal—Negative | Water—Mutable—Negative |
| Ruled by the Moon | Ruled by Neptune |
| Symbol: The Crab | Symbol: The Fish |
| Night Forces—Feminine | Night Forces—Feminine |
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