The Great Mother

(day 33; continuation of yesterday’s post)

Saturn would have me number these entries and self-flagellate each day I skip. When I stopped eating after a relationship ended in 2015, and my hair fell out and the enamel of my teeth wore out and my dentist asked me if I had gotten help, that was Saturnian self-punishment. Nourishment is not earned, apparently: that would be a Cancerian assumption (Cancer, the mother, the opposite of Capricorn). Balancing the scales never occurred to me. Starving the weakness did not get rid of it; it rather compounded the problem. I became anemic.

The traditional view of the zodiac understands Capricorn as the eternal father and Cancer, its opposite across the sky, as the eternal mother. Capricorn provides. It provides structure, discipline, encouragement, foundations for success. Cancer nourishes. It loves unconditionally, it is the soft place to land. It is the breast. Capricorn is said to rule the bones: the knees, joints, skeletal system, the teeth. Cancer rules the chest, stomach, womb, and breasts: the soft stuff. 

Cancer: “That dark center where procreation flares” (Mitchell translating Rilke: Zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. I might say “that center that bears bearing,” although that’s of course a bit silly, and a lot awkward. Zeugung means begetting. The verb tragen (past tense trug) when it takes an object means to hold or bear.

In a biting mood yesterday, I rattled off a list of ways in which I am already expressing the fallen Cancerian, the moon (its ruler) in its detriment. I complain without taking action to alter my circumstances. I whine, pine, and bitch. I am incredibly loath to express my needs and to ask for what I want. I tend to mother my partners (and everyone I meet). I am currently wearing pearlescent silver nail polish…

But then, there are positive pieces. I do devote lots of time and energy to researching and syncing my behaviors, lifestyle, and nutrition with my moon cycle. Lately (and typically) I menstruate with the full moon, which you could read as anti-Cancerian (new moon is considered the correct time to bleed, for fertility, for waxing pregnant) and perhaps as an overstatement of the influence of Capricorn in my chart. It may be not so much that my issues are with Cancer itself (and its tendencies) as they are with the unchecked dominance of Capricorn.

I always thought the South Node was the place where you had been, your past lives, the stuff you’ve graduated from and can leave in the dust. The heavy expectation—gravid—of being a mother was the first thing to heave out of the window when I learned about my Cancer south node. You’re your own daddy, as N likes to say, usually accompanied by the cowboy hat emoji. You’ve embraced the Capricorn ethos as is appropriate for your ascendant.

But I recently read somewhere that the south node needs integration in this lifetime—you’re not just automatically over it—and its shadow side (the whining, the unhealthy passivity, the overcare) can and will flare up at times. How to integrate? Lean in, paradoxically, is what I read. Lean into the qualities of your South node. I am just so (is this the Aquarian Saturn?) afraid of the past. I am sick of being burned at the stake. A burnt child despises the fire…

And so, I love to cook, to clean, and to keep a lovely home. I am happy at my hearth, like Juno. Hand me a baby, and it will stop crying. These things have always been true. But, with a heart for struggle, I have always resisted what comes naturally. I was insulted when a professor told me my style was best suited for prose poetry. Since I always found enjambment to be one of the more difficult parts of composing lyric, I thought he was softening the blow of my non-fitness for poetry by suggesting my best poems were ones made of unbroken lines.

I have always felt ashamed of what comes easily. And why not? Half my interests are literally occult and the other I keep occult, out of an instinct for the power that comes with privacy. To become the Great Mother always seemed so obvious—even my body tells it, despite the Capricornian brow. When I was thirteen, my pediatrician leered that I had child-bearing hips. I have lived with years of monthly menstrual pains verified by the hospital visits to be worse than standard labor contractions; and I have hidden this violence and this all-too-feminized (or feminizing?) vulnerability from all but a few sworn to loyalty. I have also always had vivid and recurring nightmares of dying in childbirth, and am sure that these are swirling replays from the Akash.

[Oprah meme face:] But what is the truth? To reject the world’s dangerous, gendering, sexualizing presumption on my person has felt necessary since puberty. Is it any wonder I threw out the Cancer-troped will-to-baby with the misogynistic-deathtrap bathwater?

Photo: classic Cancerian feminine in a painting by Alphonse Mucha (, a Leo who got his start in Vienna painting set scenery for the Ringtheater, which job he lost when the theater burned in a fire. His career really took off in Paris)