Attack of the Fifty-Foot Crab
It's my birthday week. Here are (some of) my secrets.
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“Cancer has always had the reputation of being ambiguous and difficult to pin down, which, I feel, is a euphemism. It is in the nature of water and of the unconscious to slide fluidly from one shape to another, and it is in the nature of Cancer to live in a world where nothing is quite the same as it was five minutes ago.” —Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate
WITHOUT INTENDING TO, the English mystical scientist Michael Faraday delivered a wonderfully succinct explanation of the secret workings of astrology. In his book Experimental Researches in Electricity, he wrote: “Matter is not merely mutually penetrable, but each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the solar system, yet retaining its own centre of force.”
So much packed into one sentence. How astrology might function, yes—but also how a particular—a single atom (or individual if you like) is part of the all-encompassing unfoldment of the whole. And then there is the word ‘matter,’ which is long considered part of the polarity that is spiritual/physical, heavenly/earthly, and paternal/maternal.
The word itself comes from the Latin mater—for mother. Matter is the ‘open sesame’ into the terrain of the Mother. And once evoked, Mother summons the secrets of the physical body. And it is our body that we usually leave behind in pursuit of transcendental states of higher consciousness. There is always this splitting away from our corporeality.
We take our bodies for granted because our physicality feels prearranged and is a given. We think of ourselves as genies stuck in bottles. We also forget our origin and the astonishing fact that from one body emerged another body.
And you thought this article was about the Zodiac sign Cancer.
But back to origin. Our primordial origin—that of your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. An eternal reflection into the maternal hall of mirrors. A place from which, apparently, according to scientists, all humans have a theoretical common ancestor: A mitochondrial Eve. Our original mom lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa.
Humans love discoveries like this because, at their root, is our drive to determine origin—the beginning—the first. We persist despite there always being an ‘x’ factor related to the quest. We continue to dream and imagine The Origin—the Original Mother.
Consider the predominant creation myth of our collective reality. Scientists have no compunction in declaring the Big Bang as our universal alpha. Hmm, Convenient.
Terence McKenna once remarked how scientists cheat with respect to the Big Bang:
“This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant…notice that this is the litmus test for credulity…It is, in fact, no different than saying, “and then God said, Let there be light!” What the philosophers of science are saying is ‘give us one free miracle, and we will roll from that point forward, from the birth of time to the crack of doom.’”
So, we keep circling back to the beginning. To start questioning again. The Tarot depicts this wonderfully with the figure of The Empress sitting amidst her teeming garden, all of nature visibly on display—no secrets. But walk behind her, back toward the High Priestess sitting on her throne. Behind the Moon priestess is a curtain that no one can rent. What’s behind her lunar canopy?
From Eve. To pre-mother. To origin. To the mysteries of the Zodiacal sign Cancer. Like the crab zig-zagging her way forward, I’ve arrived at the start.