Still inside the Venus term that runs from eight to thirteen and the Venus decan that covers the whole first ten degrees, a placement that gives this degree an unusually concentrated dose of one planet, at odds with the Mars-ruled water Cancer itself is not otherwise associated with. A small girl, unclothed, leans over the surface of a pond trying to catch a fish with her bare hands, an image of a child's first, unequipped encounter with something that keeps slipping away from her.
Jones took the scene from Wheeler in 1925 without adding an interpretation of his own at the time; the reading now attached to it, describing a naive first quest for knowledge and an understanding that stays just out of reach, is Rudhyar's 1973 wording, and it reads the fish as a stand-in for elusive truth rather than as literal food, a move typical of Rudhyar's more symbolic, less immediately practical approach to the same raw material Jones treated more plainly. The shadow sits in the futility built into the scene itself, since bare hands rarely catch a fish and the degree does not promise this girl will succeed, only that she will keep trying. Cancer's own native curiosity about feeling and depth, about what moves beneath a surface, is well served by a child bent over water reaching for something she cannot yet hold.