Cancer 6: Feathering the Nest

Degree six closes out the run of Mars-term degrees at the start of Cancer, one degree before Venus takes the term at seven, while the Chaldean decan stays with Venus throughout. The picture is birds, specifically game birds, working feathers loose from their own bodies to line a nest built for young that have not yet arrived. It is preparation without a guarantee, labor spent on a future the birds cannot see and have to trust.

Wheeler's image, taken down by Jones in the single 1925 Balboa Park sitting that produced all 360 degrees, gets its published gloss from Rudhyar's 1973 An Astrological Mandala rather than Jones's own 1953 book, and in Rudhyar's framing the self is quite literally plucked and given over to something not yet born. Cancer could hardly ask for a plainer statement of its own governing idea than this: the sign of nurture pictured as a bird stripping its own warmth to give to eggs it has not yet laid, protection extended before there is anything concrete to protect. The degree carries little visible shadow on its own terms, though the instinct it praises can curdle into martyrdom if the plucking never stops or the nest is built for a brood that never comes, an anxiety Cancer knows well even where this particular image does not dwell on it.