The Crab, the Beehive, and the Gate of Men

The Greek figure is the crab sent by Hera to harass Heracles during his fight with the Hydra and crushed underfoot for its trouble, an unusually thankless origin for a constellation. In the Babylonian lists the region is associated with a crab or turtle, MUL AL-LUL. The constellation is faint and has no bright star, but it holds the open cluster Praesepe, the Manger or Beehive, which appears to the unaided eye as a dim patch and was used in antiquity as a weather sign, its disappearance in haze taken as a forecast of rain. In the Platonic and later Neoplatonic cosmology transmitted through Macrobius, the solstitial points were treated as gates of the soul, Cancer the Gate of Men through which souls descend into birth and Capricorn the Gate of the Gods through which they return, an idea that shaped a good deal of later esoteric astrology.

Macrobius's gate imagery was not his own invention but drew on earlier Neoplatonic sources, chiefly Porphyry's lost commentary on the Republic, of which Macrobius's own account is one of the fullest surviving witnesses; the doctrine held that souls descending into birth through Cancer's gate drink from the river Lethe and forget their prior state, while souls ascending through Capricorn's gate at death recover it. Ancient Egyptian tradition, working from a different set of correspondences entirely, associated this stretch of sky with the scarab beetle, a symbol of rebirth arrived at independently of the Greek crab.