Cancer 3: Leading the Shaggy Deer

The Chaldean face sequence still gives this degree to Venus, and the Egyptian term table still holds it under Mars, one degree short of the term changing hands to Venus at degree eight. The scene: a man wrapped in fur, out in weather cold enough to require it, walking a deer whose coat has gone shaggy for the same season, the two of them companions in enduring rather than escaping the cold.

Wheeler gave Jones this image in their 1925 Balboa Park session in whichever order the shuffled card happened to fall; the reading now attached to it is Rudhyar's 1973 gloss rather than anything Jones himself published in 1953, and it is worth noticing that Rudhyar reads a picture of two creatures simply persisting through winter as an active test rather than a passive wait. That reading has a shadow worth naming: endurance mistaken for progress, fur and shagginess as adaptations that let a creature survive a season without changing anything about it. Cancer governs shelter and the instinct to protect what is vulnerable, and a man bundled against weather while leading a smaller, equally bundled animal through it is a fairly literal picture of that instinct at work, whatever else the degree is asked to mean.