A woman and two men, shipwrecked together, find themselves sharing a small island somewhere in the South Seas, thrown into close and unchosen company by circumstance rather than by any relationship they built beforehand. The Moon rules the decan and Jupiter the term through degree twenty-six, both benefics presiding over a scene that, on its face, describes a disaster.
Jones took the image down from Wheeler in Balboa Park in 1925; the reading attached here is Rudhyar's 1973 language, reading the wreck as an opportunity for new configuration rather than as loss, three strangers made suddenly, involuntarily intimate. The shadow needs no invention: three people confined together with no means of leaving carry the obvious risk of rivalry as much as harmony, particularly given the uneven arithmetic of one woman and two men that the image specifies rather than leaves vague. Cancer, the sign of home and family, is here handed a family thrown together by accident rather than choice, forced to build the shelter and the bonds a castaway needs from nothing, which is Cancer's talent even under the worst possible circumstances for exercising it. As a degree under a natal or progressed point it tends to mark improvised belonging, the household assembled from whoever the tide left together, and its test is whether accident can be worked into genuine mutual shelter.