Cancer 10: The Diamond, Uncut

The final degree of Cancer's Venus decan and still within the Venus term, a decade of the sign given over more completely to one planet than any other stretch in the whole degree, closing here at ten before Mercury takes both the term and the face together. A diamond appears in the earliest stage of being cut, still rough, still unrecognizable as the finished stone it is meant to become, worked on by a process that will necessarily remove material before anything valuable is revealed.

Wheeler's image, taken down by Jones in the 1925 Balboa Park session, is glossed on this page with Rudhyar's 1973 reading about the arduous training required to fully manifest an ideal, an interpretation rather than Jones's own 1953 wording, which is withheld here as the copyrighted text it remains until 2069. The reading fits the stone naturally: a diamond is not beautiful because it is hard, it is beautiful once the hardness has been cut into facets, and the process pictured is unfinished, promising rather than delivering. The shadow is patience tested against a process that, from inside the stone's position, could look indistinguishable from being ground away. Cancer, a sign that prizes what is already soft and formed, closes its first decan with an image insisting that some value only comes from resisting the shell entirely and submitting to the wheel instead.