The sign closes on a woman whose standing comes from lineage, a descendant of a specific, named historical event, her position in the present secured by a connection to the past rather than by anything she has done herself. Saturn rules the final term and the Moon the final decan, Cancer's own planet closing out the sign it rules on a note of inherited, institutionalized memory.
Wheeler gave Jones this image in the last stretch of their single 1925 sitting in Balboa Park; the reading on this page is Rudhyar's 1973 wording, and conservatism in his reading is doing real interpretive work, naming not just pride in the past but a determination to keep things as they were. The shadow is a heritage that has become an identity substitute, standing borrowed so completely from ancestors that little independent stands in the present. Cancer began its thirty degrees with a flag deliberately changed and now ends them with a flag, in effect, deliberately kept, ancestry honored rather than allegiance renounced, closing the sign's arc with the exact opposite gesture it opened with. Read next to the flag change that opened the sign, the pairing is a deliberate one: Cancer can be found at either end of loyalty, the degree that lets go of an old banner and the degree that has kept one, unbroken, since before the woman it now honors was born.