Cancer I-The Enchanter

Liber Hermetis
“The first decan of Cancer has the face of Venus. Its name is Seneptois. It has the form of a serpent joined with the face of a dog. In the tail, however, a heart like a pine [cone] [?]. It has half of its tail turned down and from either part of the side of the heart slender serpents rise above the dog’s head.”

Hermes Trismegistus

Picatrix
“In the first face of Cancer ascends a man with crooked fingers and a bent-over head. His body is like a horse. He has white feet, and fig leaves cover his body. This is the face of instruction, knowledge, love, subtlety, and craft. This is its form.”

Abraham Ibn Ezra

There is a moment, early in the long crossing of the unmapped country called grief, when the heart is still wholly faithful to what it loved, still organised entirely around the shape of an attachment that has, in the visible world, ceased to be reciprocal. This grieving heart does not yet know what to do with itself, for the love has not diminished. Rather, the object has become unreachable, and what remains is a current of feeling that inscribes serpentine circles, seeking a place where it might once again attach, but finds no hand to reach for, only the cool empty air. This is the territory of Cancer I, where Venus enters the ancient and watery house of the Moon, to discover there a love still fully alive but now without its accustomed channel.

The figure who guards this threshold is a strange composite being, neither one thing or another; neither dog nor serpent, horse nor man; there is something exactly right in this strangeness, for early grief is itself a hybrid state. You are neither the self one was, before the loss, nor the self one will eventually become; rather, some half-formed creature caught between worlds, instinctive and unintegrated, moving low to the ground in the manner of all things that have not yet learned to walk upright. The dog-like face suggests fidelity uncomprehending of absence, still scenting, still listening for a step that will not come; the serpent’s body suggests the coiled, recursive nature of feeling that has nowhere yet to go and so turns back upon itself, again and again, in the dark.

The fig leaves that appear, are not incidental; falling under the rulership of Venus, they are the oldest symbol of knowledge gained at cost, of innocence ended and understanding begun, and so even here, in this earliest and most disoriented decan of mourning, there is already the seed of instruction. Venus, the planet of love, finding herself in the Moon’s nurturing domain, does not abandon the griever to mere instinct but begins, slowly and gently, with the patience proper to water seeking its level, to teach a new craft, the craft of loving what cannot be held, of directing affection toward a memory, a meaning, an internal presence that asks nothing of the world’s cooperation to continue existing.

Our hero, standing at this earliest threshold, has not yet entered the deeper country of the journey, but stands at the gate, confronted by a guardian whose unsettling form is itself a test; what can be recognised in this strange creature, half animal and half something more, of any transformed capacity to love? The call to adventure in grief is rarely an invitation; more often it is an ambush, a sudden realisation that the old channels of feeling no longer reach their destination, and the guardian at the gate is not there to bar the way so much as to demonstrate, in its very strangeness, that change has already begun, that the old undivided heart cannot pass through this threshold unaltered.

This is the decan of love’s first re-education; subtle, fertile, unhurried; it asks nothing dramatic of the griever, only the quiet, persistent willingness to let affection find new and stranger shapes, to trust the slender serpents rising from either side of the heart as signs not of fragmentation but of love’s own ingenuity, reaching out along whatever pathways remain available to it. If the form this takes is at first uncanny, half-recognisable, not yet beautiful in any conventional sense, this too is part of the craft Venus is teaching here, that love, deprived of its accustomed object, does not die, but goes underground, becomes strange, and waits there, patient as water, for the slow unfolding of whatever new vessel will eventually be able to hold it.

The Symbolism.

Venus operating within the Moon’s domain creates something different from Venus in her own territory. In Libra or Taurus, Venus is composed, aesthetic, and assured. Here she’s a guest in deeply instinctual, watery, cardinal territory. Cancer is the sign of pure feeling-response, the crab’s shell protecting the total vulnerability. This Venus is not yet sophisticated; she’s nascent, half-formed, operating through instinct rather than art. The cardinal mode matters too; cardinal signs initiate; they’re the beginning of a season. So structurally this decan sits at a beginning; it suggests an early phase, raw, rather disoriented, but also powerful in its need to move forward. In the most disorganised parts of grief, after the shock has worn off but processing is yet to begin, we can acutely experience how love does not stop simply because its object has become unreachable.

The energy of attachment is still fully active; it has simply lost its destination. That’s a very particular feature of early grief, not sadness exactly, but a kind of directionless yearning, the heart still reaching by reflex toward where the loved thing used to be.

This is why the piece doesn’t yet talk about resolution or instruction in any developed sense, only the seed of it, present in the fig leaves but not yet enacted. Matters are unresolved, slightly unreal, like the rather grotesque images associated with it. The hybridity itself seems to be an important interpretive key. A creature that is animal, serpent and human all at once, not yet settled into one form, describes quite clearly the experiences of someone in early grief who is not yet one coherent self, who is operating on old instinct, still seeking the absent person (the loyal animal), partly on something more primitive (the serpent, coiling back on itself), and not yet capable of upright, integrated selfhood (the not yet fully human form).

This strange figure seems to serve as a Threshold Guardian, testing whether our hero is ready to cross; guardians are often strange, hybrid creatures that represent the unfamiliar logic of the world we are about to enter. The fig leaves, sacred to Venus, seem to be the clearest classical symbol here, unmistakably linked to the Eden narrative and knowledge gained through loss of innocence, implying the idea of future instruction within an otherwise instinctual, unintegrated image.